Cars 2 (2011) **/*****
I wasn’t one of the early members of the Cult of Pixar. I had seen the first two Toy Story movies and liked them well enough, but if they were the best that the studio had to offer, then I didn’t get what all of the hype was regarding the Pixar mystique. That changed when I heard that Brad Bird was directing The Incredibles, his name and the super hero subject matter got me to check a Pixar movie out when I had previously avoided things like Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and Cars. I really liked The Incredibles, and after that the studio went on to make Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up; what I consider to be maybe the best run of three films a studio has produced in film history. So it happened, I’m now a Pixar convert. And because I’m such a fan of their creative power, I find myself sort of disturbed when they act like every other movie studio out there and make sequels, even if I am sort of a fan of the Toy Story franchise. I was reticent about Cars 2 for a couple of reasons, firstly because of its status as a perhaps cynically and financially motivated sequel, and secondly because the original was part of that more kiddy looking era of Pixar films that I’ve been too chicken to delve into after falling so deeply in love with the mature, layered splendor of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up. I tell you all of this so that you’re aware of how much salt to take my review with. This is a part 2, but I haven’t seen the original. This is a movie that I wasn’t very excited about seeing, because I saw it as a threat to my image of Pixar as an untouchable creator of modern classics. So you might not want to believe me when I say that I absolutely hated the experience of sitting through Cars 2. You might have to venture into the movie theater and experience all of the stupidity for yourself.
Even though I haven’t seen it, I have a pretty good idea of what the original Cars was about. Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) was a hotshot young racecar who got stranded in a small town full of salt of the earth locals. Eventually, after some time sitting under the learning tree of a veteran race car voiced by Paul Newman, making friends with a local yokel tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, and wooing a female car voiced by Bonnie Hunt, McQueen learned to not be such a cocky young punk and also picked up some tricks that allowed him to move on to car racing greatness. This sequel sees Newman dead and unable to reprise his role of Doc Hudson, McQueen and (especially) his girlfriend Sally pushed off to the side, and Larry the Cable Guy’s Tow Mater unwittingly thrust into the middle of a spy plot involving British automobile secret agents Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). The spy shenanigans involve a global race meant to show off a new bio fuel, a mysterious weapon found on a remote oil rig, and a digital photo of the car who is supposed to be behind all of the shady dealings. McQueen and his pit crew get to come along to participate in the globe hopping series of races, but they certainly aren’t the focus of the film, and the rest of the characters from the original end up getting left behind to make bookend cameos only.
The biggest hurdle that this film has to get over is that it’s concept, that of a world populated entirely by talking vehicles with no humans present, is alienating and strange. In a film like Ratatouille, we are presented with talking rats, but they are living in our world, they walk among us, and they have wants and desires that exist alongside our own. Even in Wall-E, which takes place in the far future and uses a robot as its main character, we’re introduced to a world that has naturally progressed from our own and deals in issues relatable to our current lives. The Cars world is one that’s built on metaphors and puns. Under even the slightest bit of scrutiny, a world that is without humans but still looks like the one that we inhabit falls apart into absurdity. It’s the kind of insane notion that can only be accepted by very small children, and that will leave discerning adults out in the cold and looking for something human to latch onto. My discomfort with the concept was never better displayed than with the idea of automobiles eating food. There are clearly restaurants in this world, the concept of cars eating food is introduced, but we never actually see it happen beyond them drinking motor oily cocktails. I guess a parody concept for what it is cars would eat if they were like people never quite got worked out. And of course it didn’t, because a “what if cars were people” premise is an incredibly thin thing to support an entire film on, let alone a sequel as well.
The second big hurdle the film has to get over is that the plot just doesn’t work with the concept. The idea of a world being populated entirely by talking vehicles is one that only small children can accept, but the spy plot involving double crosses, the global oil market, and the slow adoption of alternative fuel sources, is going to fly completely over their heads. And the protracted experience of having all of its intricacies explained will bore you to tears as well. These sort of globe spanning spy plots are generally convoluted enough to give adults a challenge following them in real spy movies, in this parody for little kids it’s all just insufferable to sit through. And what a strange turn a spy film homage is for a Cars sequel to take. The plot of the first film was very much built into car culture. It dealt with the history of the legendary Route 66 and the way the new highway system changed it’s landmarks. It dealt with racing, which would naturally be the most important enterprise in a world populated entirely by cars. Even though the Cars concept inherently doesn’t make much sense, that was the story in which it would make the most sense. What on Earth does a spy movie have to do with automobiles? The focus on Mater becoming a bumbling secret agent is completely out of left field, as conceptually ridiculous as a world populated only by anthropomorphic cars, and just poison for the possibility of this movie ending up any good. If this film had just been about McQueen having to travel around the world to compete against different kinds of cars that he wasn’t familiar with, then maybe it could have had a chance. That would have been fine enough a concept for a sequel. What we get is just a convoluted mess.
What else can we talk about? Oh, I know, how about something else that I didn’t like about this movie. Another huge problem I had with it is that the characters are largely annoying and lame. McQueen’s chief rival in the big race series is an Italian car named Francesco Bernoulli. He’s an unfunny European racing stereotype voiced by John Turturro. When looked at in a vacuum the character is annoying enough, but when viewed in relation to an extremely funny European racing stereotype like the one Sacha Baron Cohen played in Talladega Nights, the ineptitude of this film’s script becomes painfully apparent. There’s no fun being poked at stereotyping here, the prejudices held against other cultures aren’t exaggerated for comedic effect, we’re just supposed to laugh because the Italian car talks funny and is rude. The crown jewel of offensive stereotypes has to be Larry the Cable Guy’s country bumpkin portrayal of Tow Mater. Watching Larry play fish out of water as an animated tow truck is about as fun as watching him caricature hick culture in his live action films; that’s to say, it’s not fun at all. Tow Mater is a character annoying enough to be a franchise killer. Even the much-reviled Star Wars prequels have something over this series in that they at least had the sense to downplay Jar Jar Binks for the sequels; this franchise instead decides to make their version of Jar Jar the main character. Watching Tow Mater take center stage of a film is like if Seinfeld inexplicably switched to making Kramer the main character in its second season, and then recast the role with someone like Carrot Top to boot. Characters like Francesco and Tow Mater just exist as thin stereotypes, with no satire to help the medicine go down. Cars 2 isn’t just shitty, it makes offensive jokes like your embarrassing uncle.
I could go on picking apart specific things that I didn’t like forever and bore everyone to tears. Instead I’ll just cut to the chase and say that the script for this movie sucks. It juggles too many characters, too many subplots, and it has no sense of what it is or what it’s trying to accomplish whatsoever. The race sequences feel tacked on and inconsequential to the main plot. The first one manages to put the Francesco character in the role of the underdog who needs to come back, which absolutely makes no sense. The second one doesn’t show any of the racing at all, we only see the last couple seconds as McQueen and Francesco cross the finish line. And the third is completely interrupted by the espionage plotline and never gets finished at all. Which was about as literal a metaphor for a confused script writing process as I can imagine. All of the emotional stuff, which mostly revolves around the idea of blindly accepting idiot nuisances who haven’t earned acceptance, comes off as clunky and manipulative. The dialogue is lame, the emoting of the cars as human-like objects is pathetic compared to something like the robot Wall-E, and the whole thing just comes off like a bad rip-off of a Pixar film made by a far less talented group of people. Cars 2 is completely inelegant, obvious, and ordinary. There isn’t a thimbleful of the usual Pixar pixie dust visible on screen. We even get a backfiring car as a fart joke just to confirm the fact that this movie is completely stupid. The only aspects of the film that remotely calls back to the past work of this, up to this point, great animation studio are the visuals. The various cityscapes that we are introduced to are really beautiful. Every time we go to a new location we get a set of very obvious, show-offy establishing shots for each city, and the level of detail to which they are rendered is astounding. But, after those few fleeting moments, even the environment fades into the background and becomes little more than the backdrop of a video game level for the racing game action sequences. For maybe the first time ever, Pixar has put out a film that doesn’t even come close to adhering to its own standards.
But apart from comparing it to other Pixar movies, it’s hard deciding what standards to adhere to when reviewing a film that is primarily aimed towards children. In my mind there is a difference between a children’s film and a family film. When you watch something like those atrocious Alvin and the Chipmunks movies you are firmly entrenched in a children’s movie. No fully formed adult could watch those things and think that there’s any value in them, but to the newbies of this planet who don’t know any better they appear to be perfectly acceptable. Family films are a different story. Those are films that can appeal to anyone from a four year old to grandma. Spielberg’s best work was in family films; everything I’ve seen from Pixar up to this point was a family film. Cars 2 is firmly in the camp of being a children’s film. If you’ve got a young kid who loves Cars, or maybe just loves cars, then the images of seeing talking automobiles zooming around the screen and getting into hijinx could be enough to keep them entertained. But even in my theater I noticed a huge amount of little kid chatter and adult shooshing going on after we got past the first race. I know that this is a phenomenon common to any daytime screening of a movie for kids, but it all started taking place so specifically in the same five minute time frame that I couldn’t help but think that it was an instinctual reaction from little kids who could realize, on some base level, that what they’re watching was boring and crappy. They may not be able to articulate it, but I think that they can feel it. Kids will swallow anything if they’re young enough, but I think that even for them quality rises to the top. They may intensely love something very crappy for a couple of months when they are really little, but sooner rather than later they move on to something else. That won’t happen to the stuff that’s really good though. Quality family entertainment will follow them through their entire childhoods, and eventually become things that they respond strongly to even in adulthood. Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up are movies that little kids today will be showing their children some day many years from now. Cars 2 is one that will eventually fade into obscurity, no matter how much money it makes in ticket sales and merchandising over the next few months. Which I imagine will be a lot.
