Avis des critiques

Bird's mix of cartoony forms and crisp, lively camerawork still makes for spectacular chases and set pieces. The world of his anti-Watchmen zips, shaming most of its live-action counterparts in the superhero genre.

What’s chilling about “Incredibles 2” isn’t its smug self-promotion; it’s the superhero essentialism—the vision of born leaders with an unimpeachable moral compass to whom all right-thinking people should swear allegiance and invest confidence—that Bird proclaims through his ever more impressive C.G.I. craft. . . . The power of total aesthetic control is also the power of total doctrinal control.

Bird entwines parody, slapstick, sentiment, and character in the unselfconscious spirit of entertainment that has always characterized our popular art at its best. His movie is a rousing, eclectic grab-bag of forms-within-a-form, encompassing everything from mock-newscast to family sitcom.

The Incredibles was a great animated film about true democracy, kind of a Howard Hawks–style reverie about what people can achieve when they preserve their individuality and work together. Incredibles 2 goes even deeper, delving into the fragility of the male ego in a world where women are asserting themselves more every day.

Once again, and more so than in the first installment, Mr. Bird is working to the steady beat of a classic action movie — ka-boom, yakety-yak, ka-boom — so much so that there are times when you wish that he would slow things down and let you luxuriate longer in the sheer loveliness of his images.

As Incredibles 2 follows so closely in its predecessor's footsteps, and in a time when a new take on the superhero genre—from the too-big-too-fail franchises of Marvel and DC to small-scale twists on the formula like Chronicle and Super—arrives in theaters almost weekly, it's hard not to be disappointed that Bird's latest is, in the end, just another superhero movie.

The action scenes may be broadly predictable, but they still offer rare humor, verve, and visual invention. There are new superheroes, funny ones. . . . And while Incredibles 2 rarely treads new stylistic or thematic ground, what it lacks in cohesion or originality it makes up for with a remorseless willingness to entertain. I’m told that certain societies have a word for such phenomena. They call them “sequels.”