Cars 2 (**½)
Directed by: John Lasseter, Brad Lewis (co-director)
Starring (voices): Larry the Cable Guy, Owen Wilson, Michael Caine,
Emily Mortimer, Eddie Izzard, Jason Isaacs, Thomas Kretschmann, Tony Shalhoub,
John Torturro, Lewis Hamilton, Stanley Townsend, Bonnie Hunt
Seen: July 15th 2011
**½
Out of ****
Cars wasn’t my favourite Pixar movie, and Cars 2 continues the
downward trend. While Cars 2 is brilliantly animated, it feels like a Saturday
morning cartoon rather than a feature film. The animation is so good, at times
I was wondering whether what I was seeing in the background was animated, or
just London itself inserted, while other scenes featured some of the most
believable explosions and action sequences I’ve yet seen animated (on par with
The Incredibles).
Having won the Piston Cup (now renamed in honour of Paul Newman, who
died after lending his vocal talents to Doc Hudson in the first movie) four
times now, Lightning McQueen (Wilson) is famous and constantly on tour. Visiting
Radiator Springs he catches up with his best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy)
and girlfriend Sally Carrera (Hunt), and in his time off Mater manages to get
McQueen entered into the World Grand Prix, where he competes with some famous
cars, most notably Italian F1 race car Francesco Bernoulli (Torturro).
Things are not as simple as it seems though, as while McQueen becomes
largely a background character busy racing, Mater is unwittingly pulled into
international espionage and intrigue, as two British spies, Finn McMissile
(Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Mortimer) mistake him for an American spy, seeing
his complete ignorance and clueless bumbling as good cover in the spy industry.
The “evil” agents are all “lemon” cars, the cars that usually spend more time
and money on repairs than anything else, and their plot involves sabotaging the
World Grand Prix in a rather complicated plot for a movie that so pervasively
feels like a kids only movie. Sir Miles Axlerod (Izzard) sponsors the World
Grand Prix to showcase his new biofuel, Allinol, adding a relatively heavy
environmentally laced subplot to events. As the Grand Prix moves from Tokyo to
Italy to London for its three stages, the threat against McQueen’s life grows
and Mater must come to terms with his new alter-ego while overcoming some personal
issues in the movie life-lesson portion of the plot, and along the way there
are moments of levity and hilarity that does make you smile, but unfortunately
not for long.
The usual kind of “life-lesson” extolled in a movie like this is so obviously
splattered across the screen that I was expecting bullet points to show up on
screen as part of the presentation. Of well-integrated story-telling like Pixar
displayed in the Toy Story movies, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and Finding
Nemo there are only empty echoes, and a level of disappointment never
previously experienced in a Pixar movie hovers over Cars 2, one which the first Cars movie
only quietly hinted at. The voice talent is good as can be expected in a modern
day animated feature, with some big names lending their voices, and as I said
earlier the animation and 3D is very good. Cars 2 isn’t bad, it’s just bland,
and it is probably just a small misstep for Pixar, who’ve created some of the
most memorable animated features in cinema history, and who’ll surely continue
to do so after Cars 2, with The Brave already looking to be quite promising.
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