Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
7/17/11
Few critics share my love
of genre movies and action spectacle, so I’m accustomed to reading reviews
of movies I liked where the writer is punch drunk after spending 90 to
150 minutes with characters and situations that mean absolutely nothing
to them. Unwilling to suspend disbelief for anything that doesn’t
make perfect sense and uninterested in all the sorts of cross-references
that pepper the background, the critic is left to simply roll their eyes
and say “more of this crap!” I liked Cars, the 2006 Pixar
hit that introduced us to race car Lightning McQueen and his friends from
the small car town of Radiator Springs. But after that nice little,
2nd-tier Pixar project sold about a billion toys, Disney ordered up a sequel
designed not for fans of the original, but rather fans of those toys.
And as someone who’s never picked up a die-cast Lightning McQueen (or more
importantly one of comic relief sidekick-turned-leading tow truck Mater),
Cars 2 has absolutely no entry point for me. The characters
that had depth and arcs last time are now simply putting their pedals down
and racing full-speed through a third-rate Flintstones episode in
which the characters travel to Europe and “get mixed up with spies”.
The jokes are lame, the action unexciting and the “lessons” kinda creepy.
Cars 2 looks nice, no doubt about that, but otherwise it’s pretty
much exactly like spending an hour and a half watching some 3-year-old’s
favorite Saturday morning cartoon. That kinda sucks.
Race car Lightning McQueen
(voice of Owen Wilson) has been on a winning streak ever since the events
of Cars, but now he’s back in Radiator Springs to follow the advice
of the late Doc Hudson by stopping to smell the roses. Wacky tow
truck and his self-proclaimed best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) is
excited to make up for lost time by spending every waking moment by Lightning’s
side. When European racer Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro) mocks
Lightning on national TV for not participating in a race organized by Sir
Miles Axelrod (Eddie Izzard) to promote his alternative fuel Alinall, Mater
calls in and ends up pushing his friend into joining the race. Guilt-tripped
by his girlfriend Sally (Bonnie Hunt) into taking Mater along, McQueen
heads for Europe. There, Mater is mistaken by spies Finn McMissile
(Michael Caine) and Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) with an American agent
they’re supposed to make contact with. Someone’s targeting the cars
in that race, and before it reaches the finish line, Mater will have to
make like a real spy to save his best friend.
I had Matchboxes as a kid,
but my favorites tended to be the special vehicles like the moon rover
and the telephone repair truck: I was always an action figure kind
of kid. So the mere sight of talking cars going really fast doesn’t
geek me out at all, and I don’t have the kind of knowledge of automotive
history to pick up on any of Cars 2’s in-jokes. The mystery
story is a non-starter because it contains exactly one suspect, and while
the casting of Michael Caine tries to provide a little 60’s spy movie kick,
ultimately only Michael Giacchino’s score does anything with the idea.
The movie’s like that pretty much across the board, calling Brent Musberger
Brent Mustangberger (I think I mentioned The Flintstones) and such
but never really doing anything FUNNY. And the rules of the car world
that were relatively tight in the original have now given way to a willingness
to do anything that supports a fleeting sight gag or plot point.
Living planes and boats are kinda cool, but what’s with all the references
to cars being manufactured? By whom, and why? And if replacement
parts exist, why don’t the movie’s villains, flush with cash and bitter
about having second-rate parts, just fix themselves instead of trying to
rule the world? And after Cars did so much clever work creating
a world for “people” who roll around on four tires, the way the new movie’s
characters just bend their wheels like hands and are otherwise indistinguishable
from us shows a real poverty of imagination.
But all quibbles are secondary
in the face of the ill-fated flipping of lead and supporting characters.
Lightning McQueen was far (very far, in fact) from the finest Pixar lead,
but at least he was a leading character. Mater, a cute “Awwww, he’s
goofy and now he’s sad” supporting character last time is so overmatched
by the challenge of being the lead that he’s actually kinda creepy.
Trust me, we’ve all had or been (or in the case of most of us, both) that
person who likes someone else a little too much and gets all crazy/needy
while they slowly back away, but suggesting to a generation of kids that
those are actually positive character attributes is not doing anyone any
favors. Ditto the movie’s celebration of Mater’s social ineptness
and idiocy. The story hammers pretty hard at the notion that you
should just be yourself and if the world doesn’t declare your every moronic
act adorable, then screw them, but I’m pretty sure not one word of that
resembles the way life is actually lived. Yes, Mater’s sweet and
loyal and all that, but he’s also seriously annoying, and needs to work
on that, not get a trophy. Across the board, Cars 2’s lessons
are Disney boilerplate, and almost always wrongheaded. It also includes
the cinema’s first-ever high-speed chase in which the two characters involved
shout platitudes at each other.
I laughed out loud once or
twice during Cars 2 (the “monster truck” sight gag is a hoot, and
Larry the Cable Guy sells the hell out of a stupid bit of wordplay near
the end), but at its best it’s more cute than funny. The car designs
are pretty simplistic and it was hard for me to tell the vehicles that
didn’t appear in the first movie apart. I didn’t see it in 3D, but
the surfaces certainly did look shiny, and there’s an expensive glaze to
the large-scale action sequences even as they just seem to include a lot
of running around for no good reason. And in trying to create a G-rated
oilbath full of gunplay and death, director John Lasseter and his co-director
Brad Lewis (what is a co-director, anyway? Is that the title you
get for having not directed Toy Story?) cut
away, sometimes about a mile away, the moment anything exciting seems to
have happened.
In the interest of fairness,
I should point out that the audience I saw it with, deep in the heart of
NASCAR country, really seemed to enjoy Cars 2. But while I
had reason to think I would, as a fan of the original, it’s not for me
in any way. Which is different than saying it’s no good… to a point.
It’s no good, but that doesn’t mean you won’t like it.
P.S. The movie does
come with a very cute Toy Story short attached. |
