Everyone everywhere, if they are truly honest with themselves, is a little bit terrified of babies. They are tiny tyrants that destroy whole worlds and remake them in their image, lording their fragility over the grown-ass adults that surround them, rendering everyone who isn't working for the Trump Administration into a doting stupor. In some ways, a baby is the most powerful being you'll ever encounter, and fortunately for us, they really have no idea.

I suspect that giving a baby superpowers—not just one superpower, but all of them—wouldn't be nearly as fun to deal with in real life as it is in Incredibles 2, the sequel to Pixar's 2004 hit superhero movie. But it is a great metaphor, and probably the only place the movie really succeeds in spite of being incredibly fun from start to finish.

Despite coming fourteen whole years after the first film, Incredibles 2 starts immediately after that film's end, with the Parr family—Bob (Mr. Incredible) and Helen (Elastigirl), along with their kids, Violet, Dash, and baby Jack-Jack—performing a very public act of heroism in a world where superheroes are still very much outlawed. While this gains the ire of pundits who believe superheroes just make things worse, it also gets the attention of Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), an idealistic salesman who wants to mount a publicity campaign to get public support for repealing the superhero ban by having Elastigirl be the new face of superheroes.

The majority of the story that follows is an inversion of the first. Where The Incredibles was a family comedy about a dad having a mid-life crisis and sneaking out to do outlawed superhero work while the wife stayed home to be A Good Mom, Incredibles 2 sends Mr. Incredible home to watch the kids while Mom gets her groove back. Turns out that she's great at being a superhero, she always was—but chose to make a compromise that her husband would never consider until Deavor's offer more or less forces him to. The movie doesn't really sink into this dynamic on anything but the most superficial level—Bob knows he should be supportive of Helen and gamely agrees to be a stay-at-home dad, as much as it pains him—and there are loads of fun jokes that come out of it. But it could be smarter, in the way the first film was, wordlessly using clandestine superheroics as an all-ages stand-in for emotional infidelity.

This shallowness extends to the film's villain, who doesn't really have any particular ideological stance other than "we watch too much TV." Again, this is not me demanding a children's movie be high art. It's just a big way the film lets itself down from the high water mark set by the first. And that's the biggest drag—how easy the movie is. It's family is the broadest pastiche of American sitcom comedy and it works. Its best jokes come from the shopworn house of Dads Don't Know What They're Doing and they kill. It's villain might as well be someone who saw that "Old Man Yells At Cloud" Simpsons joke and built a Pinterest board around it. And...I had a good time, even though I saw the whole deal from a mile away and recognized how much of the film reads like a list of complaints from a cranky old dude who's scared about not being able to keep up.

And so Jack-Jack, the youngest Incredible, the most remarkable character in the movie's world and the simplest by nature, becomes the best thing about Incredibles 2. He's a tiny avatar of chaos, an adorable beacon of potential. He can be anything, at any time, and Incredibles 2 only works because it's full of people who want to work tirelessly to make sure that he becomes someone good.