5.0
Cars 2 Review
Pixar have been making the most consistently enjoyable animated films for the past 16 years, with their only exception being the original Cars. That film wasn’t a horrid abomination, but compared to the rest of the company’s oeuvre it just didn’t stack up. It’s characters were shallow, the story was hackneyed and it was borderline boring to watch, receiving the highest number of bad reviews for a Pixar movie up until that point in time. Disney didn’t mind that though, cause they made a shit-tonne of money off the merchandising from that movie, 5 Billion dollars in money to be exact, so it made sense that the mouse house would beg Pixar for a sequel.
So here’s Cars 2, a kids movie that makes the first in the franchise look like a masterpiece. If you thought the characters were shallow the first time around, the sequel makes them even less likeable. Pixar have heard the cries of people who called the first movie boring and have gone and made a movie full of action and explosions to try and make a more entertaining film, the downside with doing this has been that they’ve made Mater the main character and put him in an uninventive spy plot. Mater made a decent side-kick in the first film, but this time he’s front and centre, and the result is quite awful. Imagine, if you will, if George Lucas had centred the Star Wars prequels around Jar Jar Binks. Yeah, it’s that bad.
The plot of Cars 2 is a complete turn around from the first movie and sees Mater being thrust into a world of mystery and intrigue. Finn McMissile (Michael Caine), one of britain’s top secret agents, and his partner in spying, Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), find Mater and mistake him for another spy voiced by the far more entertaining Bruce Campbell. It turns out that a secret organisation is trying to make a petroleum company look bad – or something – so the spy’s need to stop them – for some reason – and Mater fits into that – somehow. Oh yeah, and everyone’s a car.
I honestly stopped caring half way through the film because the plot is so half-assed that you’d think this was coming from a different company; It just doesn’t feel like a Pixar movie. When I sit down to watch a Pixar movie I expect a well told story with a cast of loveable characters, a tonne of heart and a lesson to be learned. Cars 2 offers none of this. Lightning McQueen and friends get very little screen time because Mater’s off with the Spy’s most of the time, and while Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer and the cast of super villains all put on fine performances, their characters are less than two dimensional.
This is Mater’s movie, without a doubt, and that’s its biggest downfall. I’m sure there are people out there who like Larry The Cable Guy’s brand of humour, but I’m not one of them. He’s not funny, he’s irritating, and basing an entire movie around that brand of stupid redneck humour and filling it with anthropomorphic cars without giving an explanation why they’re the dominant form of life on earth was a terrible, horrible idea.
When they first announced Cars 2 I had mixed feelings. I didn’t hate the first movie but it wasn’t very good, so more of that wasn’t very enticing, but they had the opportunity with this sequel to build on the world of the original and I was hoping they would make the characters more well rounded and maybe give an explanation as to what the hell had happened to all the humans. Instead of that they went backwards and created even more questions than the original. Why are there spy cars? Who makes the bullets for their guns? Who sets up the street racing tracks!? Why do the cars have different accents?! If you want the answers to these questions, you won’t get them.
I hate Cars 2. I used to have the highest respect for Pixar, believing that they truly cared about telling a great story more than making a tonne of money, but this movie is the first sign that they’re now a part of the Hollywood machine. Hopefully next year’s Pixar film, Brave, will restore a little bit of my respect, but we won’t know until then. Young kids will probably love Cars 2, it’s shiny and kid’s are stupid so they’ll probably like Mater, but if you have kids who want to go, get someone else to take them or take a good book to read. Not Recommended.
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