Ryan McNeil
What’s everyone complaining about?
CARS 2 begins by informing us that Radiator Springs’ adopted son, Lightnin’ McQueen (Owen Wilson) is a four-time Piston Cup champion. While back home for some R&R with his best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) and girlfriend Sally (Bonnie Hunt), he learns that a new racing series is coming together. A Wolrd Grande Prix has been organized by Miles Axelrod (Eddie Izzard), a tycoon trying to push a new alternative fuel. The racing series wants to bring together the champions of various racing circuits, and pit the against each other for one winner-take-all event.
As all this is happening, strange things are afoot. An evil mastermind named Professor Zündapp has been commanding a rogue group of misfit cars, and amassing oil reserves the world over. Trying to stop Zündapp is Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) – British secret agents. Through a wild series of co-incidental events, McMissile and Shiftwell come to think that Mater is their American intelligence contact, and enlist him into the fight against Zündapp.
While Mater doesn’t completely understand what’s going on around him, he goes along with it…mostly because he feels out of place. See these foreign customs that he’s experiencing with the Grand Prix tour don’t really sit well with his style, and after embarrassing McQueen one time too many, he finds himself a bit lonely…and happy to go along with anyone that treats him with half an ounce of respect.
If I had to sum CARS 2 up in one word, the word is “messy”…but one should not confuse “messy” with “bad”. Let’s get some of the obvious bits out of the way:
Yes, Pixar officially has a new cellar dweller.
Yes, pushing Mater to the forefront wasn’t the greatest idea.
And yes, talking cars remains a silly premise.
With all of that in mind, there is nothing on the screen in CARS 2 that makes it any worse than the last two Shrek sequels. Matter of fact, there’s nothing on the screen that makes CARS 2 worse than most of what Dreamworks has been offering up for the last decade. We as an audience have come to expect the moon from Pixar, and just because they didn’t bring us something great does not mean that they brought us something bad.
For starters, the race sequences involve some really fantastic direction. We get more of what we saw in the first film, but on an F1 style track allowing for more exciting visuals. Further, the actual dastardly plot afoot by Zündapp and his henchmen is actually pretty clever. I’ve always been a big one for motive in a crime story, and the standard motive of money gets old after a while. Having lemon cars lead a plot against energy efficiency is a neat twist: combining a want for world dominance with the lingering hang-up of being a cast-off.
There are far worse things in the world than a Pixar spy movie – even one that is cast with talking cars. One switch that I might have made, is to drop the characters we knew from the first film even further into the background. Were the film to task McMissile and Shiftwell with solving the caper while the World Grand Prix plays out behind them, the result might have made for a better experience.
If the film did need to keep the original band of misfits in play, Pixar might have wanted to pull a different character to the forefront. I don’t have any problems with Mater, nor the fact that he’s an extension of Larry the Cable Guy. However, I didn’t think his character was the right fit for the spy story. I liked the relative restraint Pixar has shown with Mater, and actually quite like his role in a tale about loyalty…but I didn’t think “the fool fooling people with his foolishness” was the right play.
I’m not here to champion the film the same way I champion its predecessor (which remains a deceptively good film). What I’m here to do is try to slow the tide of hate. The film made me laugh, made me smile, and once again provided for at least a few bits of visual wonder. It delivered a story that wasn’t completely predictable from the moment the light turned green, and dared to deviate from the original formula that spawned it.
Pixar might have miscalculated, but when Pixar misses the bullseye they usually at least still manage to hit the target.