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Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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The first Cars movie wasn't Pixar's best. Oddly enough, after playing the PS2 game, I began to like the characters more, and therefore, I began to like the film more.
I don't think that's going to work this time.
Cars 2 isn't Pixar's worst film - that dubious honor still belongs to A Bug's Life - but it's certainly their second-worst. After more thoughtful efforts like Wall-E and Up, and the funny yet emotionally touching Toy Story 3, Cars 2 is a huge step backwards for the studio. The entire time I was watching it, I felt like I was watching a movie made for 10-year-olds. This was a pretty big disappointment, knowing many of the people who work at Pixar (as a result of my time at CalArts, where a lot of the animation industry culls its talent from). I suppose I should've seen this coming, since a couple of years ago (prior to Up being released) a friend of mine there expressed his concern that Cars 2 was going ahead even though no story had been written for it yet. It wasn't just a slight concern either, it was more of a "the hammer is going to fall" concern. But Pixar had managed to pull bad films back from the brink before (Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille were basically gutted and re-made halfway through production), so I figured the same would be the case here.
Not so. Cars 2 has potential, but never realizes it. The basic premise is that the now-four-time-champion Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is invited to race in the World Grand Prix, and somehow he and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) - his rusty tow-truck best friend - get mixed up in a spy adventure. Now, that sounds fun. Reminiscent somewhat of Speed Racer (the series, not the movie), and in Speed Racer, it was all about the racing. The exotic locales, the opponents, the challenge of overcoming adversity, and through it all was the undercurrent of some villainous adversary trying to do something that Speed had to stop. With Cars 2, I expected the World Grand Prix to be the focus. For there to be a lot of racing, and strategy, and exotic locales, and exciting action. Lightning McQueen as Speed Racer. That would work for me.
But that's not what this is. After Cars came out, Pixar created a number of shorts called Cars Toon - Mater's Tall Tales. These aired on the Disney Channel, and of course, are available on home video. The premise being, Mater would start off telling a story like, "Why that reminds me of the time I was a famous stunt truck..." and then it would become a fantasy/flashback where Mater would be a stunt truck, and somehow Lightning McQueen was there, and hilarity would ensue. Then they'd be back to the present where McQueen would say, "That never happened", then something from the fantasy would show up to reinforce Mater's story. The end. And Disney could sell toys of Stunt Truck Mater. Entertaining enough as little short subjects, but that is basically what Cars 2 is. It's Mater's film. It's his spy adventure. Racing merely serves as a backdrop in the film, and Lightning McQueen has very little to do in the film (and his cohorts from Radiator Springs are all but left out of the movie). There's almost no time spent during the races, and the results are completely inconsequential. The bulk of the film is spent with Mater and two British spies - Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) - trying to stop a group of evil cars from sabotaging the race for nefarious and somewhat convoluted, yet utterly boring, purposes.
Now this could have made for a fun film, but it didn't. The writing simply isn't good enough. The movie's not funny enough. The dialog isn't smart. There are way too many toilet jokes in the film. I don't care if it is a car, I don't want to see it sitting over a bidet getting water shot up its rear-end. I don't want to see it peeing its pants in public (yes kids - incontinence is funny). I don't want to see a bad guy dunked into a tank of raw sewage. I don't want fart jokes. If I wanted to see that kind of crap, I'd go see a DreamWorks film. Even without all of that, what's left onscreen simply isn't very funny, or entertaining, or emotionally resonating, or interesting, or engaging. It's just weak. I counted the times I laughed during the films, and I got four mild chuckles out of the whole thing.
There was also something else in this film that really just bothered me though. The whole idea of a Cars world without humans. The first film mostly worked, since it was written and staged so that it didn't seem too weird that there weren't humans in it. You could give it a pass in that regard, if you didn't think about it. But in this film, humans are completely conspicuous by their absence. It's a world built for humans. There are too many things that only humans could do or would need that the world just doesn't make sense. And there are too many inconsistencies, too. Most of the time when cars eat or drink (which in itself is a weird concept), it's oil. They drink that through their mouths (although gasoline gets put in their tank directly). But there's a scene where Mater is going over to a food line, and there's a chef making sushi. Not car sushi... but actual sushi. The whole thing is meant as a way to get Mater to eat wasabi, and subsequently freak out, make wacky faces, and humiliate himself in public. The number of things that they simply gloss over in regards to how things are moved, built, assembled, held, or used by characters who can basically only move their tires and radio antennae is mind boggling. Maybe not to a 5-year-old, but for the rest of us, it's a pretty hard world to accept now. It's just gotten too complex to buy into. (Admittedly, if the film had been more entertaining, maybe I wouldn't have been dwelling on what the filmmakers probably considered insignificant minutiae.)
Cars 2 seemed like a film made solely for two reasons: First, to cash in on the massive success of Cars merchandising ($2 billion per year). Every corner you turn in this film, there's a new character introduced that just seems to have "Buy me!" stamped on it. Cars is a natural for merchandising. Mix cartoons + cars and what 3 to 12 year old boy wouldn't want that? It's Disney Princesses for the male demographic (and girls like Cars too, judging by my nieces). Now, you add spy gadgets (and fart jokes) to the mix, and you have a merchandising gold mine. How many different versions of Mater alone can they sell? Normal Mater, Mater w/gatling guns, Mater with rockets, Mater with parachute, Mater with vampire disguise, Mater with bad-guy truck disguise, Mater with lederhosen, funny car Mater, Kabuki Mater, peeing Mater, farting Mater, Mater with removable air filter cover... and on and on and on. Then of course there will be different versions of Lightning McQueen, since he has different wheels and tires in different scenes (I figured out after the fact, that one set was supposed to be the equivalent of dress shoes). And then there's all of the other race cars. And all of the villain cars. And the good-guy spies. And planes. And boats. And on and on and on. The second reason for Cars 2 was that it seemed as if director John Lasseter saw what Brad Bird did with The Incredibles, and wanted to make a spy/adventure thriller of his own. It really felt that derivative, but yet completely lacking in everything that made The Incredibles such an awesome film.
From the standpoint of how well the film is made technically, I suppose it's about as good as you could do with the material. It's a decent looking film, but lacks the visual punch of their previous efforts, and lacks the cleverness and visual impact of even the first Cars film (with its expansive desert vistas). They really blew the opportunity to make this a World Grand Prix. Instead, we see snippets of it, and frankly, it looks too much like our own world (again... where are the humans?). The animation is just fair, because there's not much you can do with cars with faces. And if anything, there are too many "cheats" in this film, where the cars try to do too much with their tires (McQueen and Mater do an elaborate handshake which was really stretching beyond anything established in the first film), or too much is left unexplained (too many small objects that would need to be manipulated). There is also one moment in the film where they seem to be poking a little fun at the Chevron cars, which instead just comes across as oddly disturbing and very much out of place (think "eye transplants").
Speaking of out of place, there's a fair amount of violence in this film. Now, probably no more so than a typical spy film, but when a living car is tortured to death on screen, that doesn't exactly seem very fitting for a movie aimed at little kids. In fact, there's some intense and loud action in the film, that was freaking at least one little kid in the theater right out. (Note to parents: you shouldn't be taking real little kids to screenings that start at 9:45 PM.)
Cars 2 just wasn't the fun movie it should have been. The humor wasn't up to Pixar's standards. The story was weak. The characters were weak or under-utilized. There was bad casting throughout (the villain was completely forgettable, and while Michael Caine is great in live action, as a voice actor he's downright bland), and there just wasn't enough racing. Someone mentioned to me that he'd thought of it more positively after a friend at Pixar told him to look at it as if John Lasseter was playing with his own toy cars. Rrrright. The only one who has fun when they're playing with toy cars, is the person playing with them. For the rest of us, I guess we're left with the sight of a pudgy, balding, middle-aged millionaire in a Hawaiian shirt, making "vroom! vroom!" noises while pushing toy cars around on a carpet. That's just not worth the price of admission.
Cars 2 gets a 4.5/10. (But only because Green Lantern was worse.)
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