Tweet

Comments (9)

 1 of 2

Cars 2 Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: G Genre: Animated, Children, Family Theater release: June 24, 2011 by Disney/Pixar Directed by: John Lasseter Runtime: 1 hour 52 minutes Cast: Larry the Cable Guy (Mater), Owen Wilson (Lightning McQueen), Michael Caine (Finn McMissle), Emily Mortimer (Holly Shiftwell), Eddie Izzard (Sir Miles Axelrod) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

I have a strong suspicion that the Pixar team could have had a real corker on their hands with Cars 2, if only they'd made it … well, without the cars.

Because really, it was the cars themselves that kept the franchise's first film relegated to bottom-tier Pixar status. The easy knock against the first movie is that it's just a cartoon; it's not as conceptually sophisticated as, say, the uncompromising sci-fi vision of Wall*E, or as thematically rich as Up's meditations on marriage. It's really just a Saturday morning cartoon stretched to big-screen proportions—a characteristic shared with only a handful of Pixars (Monsters Inc., A Bug's Life, and now Cars 2).

You can fault it for a lack of ambition if you like, but there's nothing wrong with some good, frivolous cartoon zaniness, especially when it's done as well as Cars. It's good to remember—in an age where Pixar is sometimes criticized for catering more to grown-ups than to children—that they do kid stuff better than anyone. The new model is a brighter, more energetic and colorful movie than the last one—my wife called it Speed Racer meets James Bond—and I suspect it'll go over just fine with the under-12 crowd.

The movie belongs to Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy)

It is also a much more ambitious film. Perhaps John Lasseter—the Pixar boss who is in the director's chair here for the first time since Cars—was a bit shaken by the middling reviews for the first film; or perhaps he just got the creative itch to do something different. Whatever the case, this sequel is, in many ways, an entirely different film than the first. It largely ditches the rustic Americana of the original, as the cars leave Radiator Springs for a whirlwind world tour that finds Lightning McQueen competing against an international lineup of racers in a variety of exotic settings, and rusty ol' Mater getting caught up in a sinister secret agent game.

This model seems to run purely on ideas, which has led some critics to slam it as bloated, messy, and exhausting. There's a little truth to that, but it's also a genuinely exhilarating movie, and impressive in how it so gracefully transports the entire Cars universe into a completely different kind of movie. It's ambitious, which plays to Pixar's strengths; here, they get to show off their animation chops in some gorgeous scenes of Japan and Italy, and to indulge in some clever Toy Story-styled invention by grafting James Bond-isms into this automotive fantasy world.

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson)

But the biggest shift of all is that it's no longer Lightning's franchise; he's only a supporting character in this, a movie all about Mater. Indeed, McQueen is merely one of the racers in a World Grand Prix series that serves as the platform for a villainous espionage plot—and come to think of it, we really only see one of the three races that he's in. Mater is along as part of the pit crew, and, in an adequate variation of the common "mistaken identity" plot, he is taken for a spy by the suave British agent Finn McMissle (Michael Caine) and his partner, Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer).

It's Mater's movie, all right, and whether that's a good thing is a matter of preference. I'm not big on animated characters that serve simply as mouthpieces for their real-life voice actors—as opposed to being, well, actual characters. And I'm also not big on Larry the Cable Guy, the voice of Mater. The fact that a lot of his jokes in the movie involve basic ignorance of other cultures is not really a negative thing, but it does bring up unpleasant memories of Larry's comedy routine, which dips its toe into xenophobia a bit too much. Then again: Mater was and is a more interesting and charismatic character than Owen Wilson's bland speed racer Lightning McQueen.

Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer)

And it's that—not a lack of ambition—that really proves to be the weakness of this franchise. Lasseter has invested a lot of passion and energy into bringing to life the world of the Cars, in much the same way he made us believe in a world of toys. But unlike the more popular Toy Story trilogy, Cars just doesn't have memorable characters. The automotive details come easy—and with great cleverness—but characterization does not.

next page... |  1 of 2 | last page

Displaying 1–3 of 9 comments

See all comments

Rate this movie:

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4