The Incredibles

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Animation/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/115mins
Voices: Craig T Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L Jackson
Director: Brad Bird
Walt Disney/Pixar

“They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity." This is not a comment on the latest Pixar animation, but a complaint of the hero, the superhero, on the nature of the society he lives in. The line also sums up a big theme of the movie.

Mr. Incredible tells us every Superhero has a secret identity but by the end of the film we feel he means every anonymous person is a latent superhero — well, not literally, perhaps, but we all have talents that modern blandness and conformity will suppress. This is a kids film? Oh, yes, but since when did Pixar give us simple kids' films? From Toy Story through Monsters Inc. to Finding Nemo, the films are packed with knowing jokes and wonderful insights into the frailties and follies of humanity.

We start the story in some kind of golden age of superheroes. There is an abundance of them and they spend action-packed days thwarting bank robbers, saving the world and rescuing cats from trees. They take great pride in their work. But it all goes pear shaped when a less than grateful public take out a massive slew of fatuous lawsuits for unlawful rescue and resulting whiplash injuries. The government bans superheroes and hides them away in suburbia in the Superhero Relocation Programme.

Mr. Incredible ends up working as an insurance clerk, his wife ferries the kids to and from school, and the kids have the usual youthful hang-ups complicated by the need to keep their superpowers a secret. They are living the middle class anti-dream. Eventually Mr. Incredible’s patience snaps, he loses his job, and when mysterious shadowy people lure him out of enforced retirement into new adventures, he can’t resist. Naturally, the shadowy people are not who they appear to be … and the world finds it needs superheroes again. While being a gentle spoof on uniformity — American Beauty in a mask and tights — The Incredibles is a fast-paced adventure with whirl-around action, lots of robots and goofy gadgets, and in its design and story makes lots of nods to classic superhero comics and films.

The Terminal

12/18

Comedy, drama/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/121mins
Starring: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci
Director: Stephen Spielberg
Dreamworks

Christmas would not be Christmas without a big Hollywood production and The Terminal has all the hallmarks of a real hit: Spielberg and Tom Hanks Catherine Zeta-Jones and lots of comedy and pathos. But, er …
Yes, the Terminal is funny. It is also quite vapid.

It starts well enough. Hanks is Victor Navorski, a native of a fictional central Asian state who has just arrived at Kennedy airport. While en route there is a coup back home and his country in legal terms effectively ceases to exist. The immigration authorities at JFK don’t know what to do with him; Navorski has fallen through a bureaucratic crack.

They can’t let him into the country or deport him, so they confine him to the terminal, which is not strictly entering the US. They figure when the trouble has blown over in his country in a few days, they will be able to move him on. Trouble doesn’t blow over, and Navorski stays in the terminal for nine months disarming people with his simple good nature, resourcefulness and capacity for hard work.

Hanks can’t help but act well and you feel like cheering and clapping his performance of a bewildered soul who speaks no English and has no idea of what is going on around him.

Spielberg lets him down. The Terminal is billed as a feel good movie and it never gets beyond that. Navorski arranges marriages, woos stewardesses, works jolly hard for his crust and waits patiently to be allowed into the utopia beyond the airport doors. Everyone on the set is standing around waiting his or her turn to be terribly, terribly nice. Except the immigration boss (Stanley Tucci) whose nastiness really exists only to accentuate everyone else’s niceness — and somehow comes across as the only real person in the film.

The Terminal is supposedly inspired by the real-life case of Merhan Nasseri who has been stranded in a similar bureaucratic mess in Charles De Gaulle since 1988. Unlike Hanks’ casual stoicism, Nasseri has no end in sight to his predicament and is going quietly and literally insane. I wonder what he would make of this naïve film.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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