Watching Cars 2 was not on any of my bucket lists. I saw the first Cars on an airplane, and it didn’t do much for me. It was the first Pixar movie that didn’t utterly delight me on some level. However, my paying job involves teaching 18-year-olds, and one of the groups I am dealing with now is really insistent that Cars 2 is somehow some brilliant piece of cinema that I just had to watch. I decided to do so mostly to shut them up.
Hey, maybe I would like it!
So, there’s something about a spy plot where British superspy car Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) is zipping around an oil rig where international supervillain Professor Zündapp (Thomas Kretschmann) is up to something bad, but that’ll come back into play later. Mostly, I was wondering why McMissile had to hire a boat to get out to the oil rig when he had speedboat pontoons and a submarine mode. Anyway, back in Radiator Springs, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) returns to find his best pal Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) is being his usual silly self, and then there’s some global race sponsored by a wealthy Sir Mile Axlerod (Suzy Eddie Izzard), and Lightning already has a rivalry going with Italian racer Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro).
That means Lightning is taking some of the Radiator Springs gang to be his pit crew in this series of races, and while over there, newly entrusted British field agent Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) mistakes Mater for a spy. There’s a misunderstanding between Mater and Lightning, leading Mater to go off with McMissile and Shiftwell for a while, a villainous plot involving Axelrod’s new clean fuel mixture, and a whole host of other things, and the movie was exactly what I thought it was.
Basically, it’s a so-so kids movie. What made the better Pixar movies, the sort that made a movie from them that I generally looked forward to as nearly a guaranteed I was gonna have a good time at the movies. The very concept of Cars didn’t work for me, and the reason for it is is a simple one: unlike movies like the various Toy Story films, Finding Nemo, or Monsters Inc, to name a few, Cars is basically a kids movie. Those others are also kid-friendly, but they have elements that are good for adults, like a particularly heartfelt scene where a character is at their lowest. Cars is basically about talking cars doing the sorts of things older cartoons about talking cars would do. Yeah, this one does have cars getting killed in spy antics, but even when Mater is at his lowest, it doesn’t much match, say, the existential loss of self that Buzz Lightyear feels when he finally realizes he’s a toy and can’t fly.
I mean, I get it. My current students were something like 4 years old when Cars 2 came out. They grew up with this movie. This movie is for them. It’s not for me. It’s not the sort of movie you should think about too much. That’s basically why I can’t get into it. I want more from Pixar than the first two Cars movies ever went for. Maybe the third one did, but at this point, I don’t much care about finding out. Cars 2 is basically a movie without much wrong with it, but there’s not much worth seeing it for if you didn’t grow up with it or are some kind of motorhead or something.
Grade: C
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