Cars 2 is something more disappointing than Pixar’s first unmistakably mediocre film: It’s a work of disheartening anonymity.
In the 16 years since their pioneering masterpiece Toy Story, Pixar did more than accumulate one of the most consistently excellent track records in Hollywood history. They fashioned a creative culture emphasizing story, characters, theme and emotional truth.
Although each film is supposed to represent the vision of its director, there is also a sense of the studio itself as auteur or author. It’s impossible to imagine movies like Finding Nemo and Wall-E having been made anywhere else in Hollywood.
The original Cars wasn’t a great film, but it was unmistakably a Pixar work, fueled by the filmmakers’ palpable passion for stock-car racing, with a lovingly nostalgic ode to the American Midwest, the 1950s and the “mother road,” Route 66.
Cars 2, which takes Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Mater the tow truck (Larry the Cable Guy) abroad for the first World Grand Prix race, still has a lot of racing and makes a lot of cultural jokes, but there’s little sign of the filmmakers being inspired by anything beyond 007 / “Inspector Gadget” spy fantasy — something DreamWorks’ genre spoofs (Kung Fu Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens, Megamind) have done better.
Visuals aside, Cars 2 is the first Pixar film ever (or at least since A Bug’s Life) that one could easily imagine as a DreamWorks film — circa Shark Tale, perhaps, with its punningly fishified analog of the human world. Or, with its frenetic action and gimmickry, Cars 2 bears some resemblance to a Blue Sky Studios cartoon (circa Robots, say, or Rio, with its world-culture flavor). In a word, not only is Cars 2 mediocre, it doesn’t even feel like mediocre Pixar.
More pointedly, Cars 2 is exactly the sort of sequel many Pixar fans feared Disney was poised to crank out back when it looked like Pixar and Disney were parting ways. Pixar owned the films, but Disney had sequel rights, and a Pixar-less version of Toy Story 3 was in the works at Disney until the Mouse bought Pixar, and John Lasseter, taking the reins at Disney animation, pulled the plug. Later, Lasseter reconsidered and reworked Toy Story 3 from the ground up as a pretty worthy wrap-up.
The Toy Story sequels took the characters and relationships of the original to new territory. Cars 2 takes its characters to new countries, but nothing that could be called character development occurs, and there are no relationships to speak of. Lightning still considers Mater his best friend, but other than revisiting memories of tractor tipping, there’s not much to their relationship besides Lightning affectionately tolerating or not tolerating Mater’s obnoxious or embarrassing behavior. Lightning’s still dating Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt), but their relationship’s dramatically irrelevant.
The story bifurcates into overlapping plots involving Lightning and Mater. On the one hand, Lightning accepts a challenge to race against a self-aggrandizing Italian racecar named Francesco Bernoulli (John Tuturro), a Grand Prix that will take them to Tokyo, Rome and London (with a stopover in Paris). (In a nice touch, the film establishes that Lightning, having learned that winning isn’t everything, is willing to rise above Francesco’s taunts and pass on the race in order to spend his time off in Radiator Springs — but he ultimately accepts when he realizes that his friends want to see him take Francesco down a peg.)
Mater, meanwhile, gets mixed up in an exhausted mistaken-identity spy plot involving automotive British superspy Finn McMissile (an Aston Martin, naturally, voiced by Michael Caine) and Jaguar-like Bond girl Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). Like all superspies in all such movies, Finn and Holley are so super competent that they never, ever suspect that Mater is actually an idiot and not a top American superspy pretending to be an idiot.
Which of these two plotlines is more dominant is signaled by a notable reshuffling in the credits lineup: Owen Wilson takes second billing, and Larry the Cable Guy is now the star. In fact, Cars 2 makes a lot more sense once you realize it’s not so much a sequel to Cars as a feature-length expansion of Mater’s post-Cars solo adventures, first in the short Mater and the Ghostlight and then in the TV series Cars Toons: Mater’s Tall Tales.
Cars 2’s spy story is almost exactly like a feature-length version of one of Mater’s Tall Tales, except that the tall tales are told as if they came from Mater’s overheated imagination, whereas Cars 2 tells its story straight. He even gets outfitted with Bond-car extras (afterburners, Gatling guns, etc.) — just the sort of thing that happens in the Tall Tales. Unlike the Tall Tales, in Cars 2 the violence is pretty rough, particularly for a G-rated film (in one scene a captive car is tortured and “killed” by the bad guys, and there are a number of other automotive “deaths” as well as crack-ups).
One other important difference: In the Tall Tales, Mater is a confident, competent hero who’s always in control. Cars 2 makes him a blithering buffoon who not only humiliates Lightning at a Tokyo cocktail party with his blundering behavior, but obliviously costs Lightning a race by getting distracted while acting as crew chief. Lightning takes as much of this as he can before blurting in exasperation, “This is why I never bring you to my races! I don’t want your help! I don’t need your help!”
It’s a mark of the film’s falsity that Lightning, not Mater, is ultimately adjudicated to be in the wrong, while Mater is affirmed “just the way he is.” Being affirmed “just the way he is” does not mean that Mater can’t have cool spy-movie upgrades.
“If he is your friend,” someone asks Lightning in what’s meant to pass as a wise, penetrating line, “why do you ask him to be someone he is not?” Um, because making a spectacle of yourself isn’t always acceptable behavior? Later, a contrite Lightning tells Mater, “If anyone has a problem with who you are, they’re the one with the problem.” So when Mater cost him the race, Lightning was the one with the problem?
This pattern is reiterated in the spy thread in which Mater obliviously blunders through life-and-death situations before being unavoidably confronted with his shortcomings by an unknowing remark from Finn McMissile, who refers to his “idiot tow truck” act. When Mater, stunned, asks if that’s how McMissile sees him, the superspy answers, “That’s how everyone sees you. … No one realizes they’re being fooled, because they’re too busy laughing at the fool. Brilliant cover, Mater!”
After humiliating Mater in this fashion, the movie makes it up to him in condescending, wish-fulfillment fashion, not only allowing him to save the day while demonstrating his mastery of technical minutia, but topping it off with Finn solemnly lauding Mater to his friends as “one of the smartest and most honest chaps we’ve ever met,” while Holley identifies herself as “Mater’s girlfriend,” thereby validating Mater’s earlier misapprehensions along those lines. It’s as phony a group-hug ending as any I can think of.
The automotive Cars universe, with its complete absence of human or animal life, never made sense, but at least the first movie managed to maintain an illusion of consistency. There were tractors and farms, but you could watch the film without wondering who the crops were for. In Cars 2 Mater scarfs down wasabi at a cocktail party. Wasabi? That would never have passed in the original.
One of my favorite lines is Mater’s rhetorical response to a stupid question: “Is the popemobile Catholic?” Later, though, in the Rome sequence, we actually see the white-mitered popemobile — and he’s riding in a … popemobile-mobile, which may be an absurdity too many.
P.S. Cars 2 is preceded by Hawaiian Vacation, a short featuring the Toy Story gang, now living in Bonnie’s room. Pixar’s best shorts start with a concept and noodle it in hilarious directions, often with little or no dialogue. Here, starting with a talky cast of characters developed for a feature film, they’re reduced to character gags, a number of which we’ve seen before. (Buzz pompously mispronounces a word and is corrected by Woody! Rex wants bigger arms! Etc.) Ken and Barbie were hilarious in Toy Story 3, but here they run out of juice after about a minute and a half. I suspect that removing these characters from their feature-length context, above all with Andy out of the picture, isn’t likely to pay off. Toy Story is over. Leave the characters in peace.
Register film critic Steven D. Greydanus blogs at NCRegister.com.
Content advisory: Anthropomorphized vehicular violence (including multicar crashes and car fatalities); a sequence in which a car is tortured and killed; some toilet humor, if you can believe it. Might be too much for sensitive kids.
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I’m still going to take the kids to see it, of course (because I love me some Larry the Cable Guy… Make ‘er finished!), but I think that content advisory reads just about as funny as any you’ve ever written. :-)
@ Victor: Thanks. Let me know if your LTCG love survives the experience.
arrrgghhh…now deciding wether to even go. Your criticisms will go over the head of my ‘crazy for all things w/ wheels’ 4 yr. old but surely make my older kids and myself and dh cringe! We had hoped this movie would be our big movie outing for the summer at a real theater and maybe even a bag of popcorn to share for my large family (even w/ matinee prices it can mean taking out a small loan from the bank) :-) Now, I am not so sure….darn!
Call me a snob, but I think “Larry the Cable Guy” should be a category all to himself in the content advisory section.
Nice review, Steve.
How Typical. Disney strikes again to dilute and rob our culture of anything remotely creative. It is like boiling a frog. Anything Disney, anymore, has about as much depth as a drop of water on a large plate. It makes sense why they bought Marvel as they too have gone down the same road so things seem to have lined up for them on that front. Take creativity and squash it.
Cars 2? we will probably wait many moons and then watch it on netflix streaming when it is available. Possibly for some background noise, just to say we saw it :-) then again….maybe not
@ Russell Lucas: Thanks! Your comment reminds me of a content advisory I read somewhere about 15 years ago for True Lies, which read something like “True Lies contains violence, sexual content, profanity and a performance by Tom Arnold.”
@ Rachel W—don’t you have a drive-in in your town? (One price for your LARGE van full of your kids, bring the camp chairs and your OWN popcorn and goodies!!) Our 4-year-olds must be made of the same stuff, because I was thinking how much he’s gonna love Cars 2. I know it won’t be very good viewing (thanks Steven for a great review), but think of the family bonding time :)
The crops are for bio-fuels. “In Cars 2 Mater scarfs down wasabi at a cocktail party. Wasabi? That would never have passed in the original.” What were the cocktails then? Shame, I guess I’ll have to wait for Harry Potter to get some decent cinema (I do hope they show Hermione restoring her parents’ memories, something that was confirmed by Rowling but left out of the book for some reason).
@ Pierce O.:
Ah, of course. (smacks forehead)
Oil, I think. Something automotive.
I wish I could share your optimism about Harry Potter.
I guess this settles the debate about which Pixar movie is the least impressive.
@ Mrs. Beazly: It does indeed. For now.
This makes me concerned for “Brave”, Pixar’s next film and the first one that focuses on a female character. Disney quit on fairy tales and feminine female heroes after “The Princess and the Frog”, and I fear that audience backlash against “Cars 2” will result in a reduced B.O. for “Brave” and a similar response from Pixar.
Mater may seal the fate of both children’s fairy tale films and any hope for more stories like PatF and Brave. Oh, well.
News reports state that, since it’s release in 2006, “Cars” has generated one billion, yes b-b-billion dollars PER YEAR in merchandise sales. Taking their cue from the old TV cartoons of GI Joe, Transformers, and Voltron, Cars 2 exists to serve as a feature-length commercial to sell stuff made in China.
I also read a review that says that the makers of Cars 2 wanted a villian so they chose - da da da da - Big Oil!
The brainwashing of our children begins early. The gas we put in our cars is EVIL - only biofuel Ethanol will do. And if that’s too much, plug ‘er in to the electric grid and wait 4 hours for a charge. Is that why they brought Larry the Cable Guy on board? To plug ‘er in? Watch for Cars 3 and we’ll see.
Hmmm, that might kill the race, though with everyone standing around waiting for their charge.
@ David B: I don’t know that I see Cars 2 having a negative effect on Brave. If audience response to Cars 2 is tepid (an open question at this writing), it might have implications for gratuitous Pixar sequels, but Brave is such a radically different property that I don’t see there being any carry-over. (At that point the open question will be “Will Monsters, Inc. 2 (or Monsters University) be more like Toy Story 3 or Cars 2?” And that’s an open question too, I think. At this point I trust Monsters, Inc. / Up director Pete Docter more than John Lasseter. We’ll see what happens.
@ Doug Sirman: The melancholy thing is that until now Pixar has seemed to be above the effects of such petty commercial considerations, at least when it came to creative integrity. Toy Story 3 may have been made for commercial reasons, but it wasn’t made until Lasseter could assure some level of integrity. Cars 2 is pretty well lacking in such integrity—certainly with any creative integrity to the original—and that’s something new in Pixar’s oeuvre. A mere failure wouldn’t necessarily have cheapened their brand name, but this sense of having sold out does, certainly for me.
@ Jen: Personally, I don’t think Cars 2 has much of a political outlook. It might possibly be influenced by political outlooks, but in a tertiary way. It’s not an issue I can get worked up about, in any case. If someone wanted to see the film, I wouldn’t discourage them on this ground.
Ever since i even heard there was going to be a Cars 2 i was worried, and it looks like my fears have been comfirmed! Rats! you were on a roll pixar, don’t make movies for the money, make it so the world can hear a good story, don’t be afraid of what people will think! My leading favorite is still ‘Up’, which was a charming story with heart, exotic settings, and a great ending. it was funny too(with great music). I’m not asking for an Up sequel(in fact, i would not want to see one), but a deep story that plucks at the heartstrings.
@Steven,
I bow to your greater knowledge as I have not seen the movie. However, Lasseter himself said that he was looking for a villian, and Big Oil seemed to fit the bill :)
http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/06/20/in-‘cars-2’-john-lasseter-says-big-oil-is-the-‘uber-bad-guy’/
I personally like Big Oil because it lets me fill my car with the gasoline that gets me from point A to point B.
I loved “Cars” and just judging by the trailer, it seems that “Cars 2” has left it’s heart in Radiator Springs.
“Up” is one of my all time favorite movies.
I’m torn on whether to see this. On the one hand, if this is Pixar’s first real dud, and is so because it’s a gratuitous, marketing-driven sequel, then I don’t want to encourage them by giving them any money. On the other hand, given their record, they surely deserve to have their next effort given a chance. Meaning I should see it and make sure for myself that it really is a dud. Thoughts, anyone?
Just saw the movie with my 3 oldest. Not a must see movie, but decent. It is mediocre, but this blog post misses the mark. As for big oil, it does not make it out to be evil because of the environment, but because of a manipulative power grab. That is what makes most international corporations evil, especially big oil.
@ Jen: It’s true that the villain is Big Oil. It’s also true that the villains are embittered “lemons,” disadvantaged cars less gifted than the dominant reliable models. In both cases I think the creative decisions are sort of half-baked, and rooted more in storytelling (how many kinds of villains can there be in an all-automotive universe?) than in politics, although politics certainly plays a part.
I wouldn’t say I “like Big Oil because it lets me fill my car with the gasoline that gets me from point A to point B.” I like gasoline because it gets me from point A to point B, but alternative energy is a road we will need to go down at some point, and it seems plausible that Big Oil interests have been and/or will be an obstacle to the common good in that respect.
@ Pachyderminator: I wouldn’t worry about the price of one ticket weighing heavily on Pixar one way or the other. If you’re curious and you don’t mind spending the bucks, go and see it. On the other hand, don’t feel obliged to do so out of loyalty. It’s all you.
@ Blake Helgoth: You said the movie was mediocre. I said the movie was mediocre. How did I miss the mark?
Your review perfectly captures all of the reasons I can’t really recommend the film. I remember laughing once or twice, and only dozed off once. It was, however, 108 degrees outside, and our popcorn had real butter, so I have no regrets. Also, 4 of my kids are at summer camp, so it was cheap just taking our youngest! No large van drive in experience necessary, @Marie M., although your comment made me laugh!
I can only comment on our own personal experience with this film. My son must be one of those “sensitive” children because he was quite terrified by the violence in this movie. In particular the scene where the car is tortured and then killed. My husband and him left the film early. I don’t think it can be overstated that Cars 2 is a significant departure from the original film. We were expecting a little more violence, but according to my husband it was completely over-the-top and unnecessary. Just a warning to other parents.
I think I’m near tears. For all its flaws, I loved the first Cars. I was looking forward to the sequel. This is just really depressing. I’m now terrified to think of what they’re going to do to my beloved Monsters, Inc.
Part of it’s just me, though: A bad sequel can ruin a perfectly good original for me. I just can’t stand to watch the part I used to like, knowing how it all ends up. For instance, I don’t think I’ve watched Lilo & Stitch since it dawned on me how bad the cartoon series really was.
Anyway, let’s leave aside the whole marketing gimmick and general un-Pixar-ish crappiness of the film that this review highlights. It seems to me that the movie was already doomed to fail because it lacks the spirit of the original. Cars was never about just McQueen and Mater. It was about Radiator Springs, to a significant extent. It was about all the people who lived there. Taking Mater and McQueen out of that setting, apparently away from their friends, and sending them around the world getting mixed up in what appears to be entirely the wrong movie just can’t work. What’s next? Rattatouille 2 set in a McDonald’s in Taiwan?
I haven’t seen the movie, though, so I may end up liking it anyway. One can only hope.
I’m still going to see it, but going to wait until it is showing at the second-run theater ($3/movie).
I always thought that Mater said, “Is the popemobile Cadillac?”
We took our young boys to see this film. My only expectations came from the voice acting of Michael Caine. The plot was tediously drawn out for no apparent reason. The characters lacked development. The main message that I got out of this film was that you have to accept your friends the way they are, even if they are embarrassingly ignorant. I admit that I’m overly critical of all sequels, but I was expecting a little more. You can’t make a film with mediocre content and expect ‘3-D’ to carry the dead weight. My boys liked it, but probably for the animation and familiar voices. The only thing with redeeming value to this picture was a few one liners. My advice is if you are going to go see this, keep your expectations low so that you won’t be disappointed.
I actually enjoyed this more than the first Cars, which is my least favorite Pixar movie. I don’t see big oil as the villain in this; the villains are a bunch of old lemon cars who don ‘t want to be replaced by electric cars or cars that take biofuel. I love how the “Popemobile” is shown, and how the all cars references include a shot of “Gas-tows” in hommmage to Ratatouille.
I’ve seen portions of the CARS 2 wish my children hadn’t. It was a great disappointment. Violence,cars being kidnapped and tortured,drunken party,sad,sad,sad. My 7yr old has been having nightmares of being kidnapped ever since. Want family time, have a board or card game and popcorn. You’d definately get more interaction. I wish my crew had never seen it.
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