Cars 2 [Review by Haus]

I saw Cars 2 tonight. It’s stunning in some ways, hateful and hollow in others. I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it. I’ll explain.

First, a disclaimer: I find many Pixar films almost sickly sweet in their heartstring-tugging storytelling, all hewing very closely to standard Syd Field type rubrics. While they push the boundaries of curved-surface voxel-porn and thousand-light-source 3D rendering, they’re utterly formulaic when it comes to their plot points. The visuals are cutting edge, the stories are anything but.

That said, formulaic stories can be done well, and Pixar’s often are. (Though admittedly not creative, these tried-and-true tales are emotionally satisfying. They’re formula for a reason.) The standard Pixar approach is to play it safe (or at least wholesome) by wrapping its latest CGI achievements around an aw-shucks story that simply can’t go wrong.

True to this form, the original Cars (2006) was a thoroughly enjoyable film, even though every plot point came straight from Screenwriting 101. Owen Wilson was watchable (listenable?) voicing Lightning McQueen, a hot-shot race car who finds himself stranded among the quaint inhabitants of a forgotten desert town. Sure, the story was your typical “fish out of water comes to appreciate the quirky authenticity of his temporary prison” arc, and the creature known as “Larry the Cable Guy” was characteristically annoying as the arch-redneck tow truck Tow Mater. But the story was well told. Cars had some touching moments, some solid humor, and also — my favorite — some great nods to rare cars, racing history and car lore. One example: Michael Schumacher — without question one of the greatest Formula 1 drivers of all time — voiced a cameo. Another: The (Fabulous) Hudson Hornet made an appearance (voiced by late racing nut Paul Newman), and the brief scene in which that car’s rattly old idle gives way to a pure, throaty and race-ready exhaust note still makes my nerves go all funny. (Go on, watch it. It’s honestly one of my favorite scenes in film — a fact that has more to do with cars than films.) In short, the first Cars was a solid if predictable story with terrific visuals, and while I’m sure it was immensely enjoyable for kids, the whole thing played equally well as a private cocktail hour for car nuts. Full win.

Cars 2 is a substantial departure. Gone is the little town of Radiator Springs (unless you count its own cameos), replaced with a parade of exotic destinations — chiefly Tokyo, London, and a fictionalized pseudo-Monaco. These are rendered with terrifying beauty and a superhuman attention to detail. (Truly. The visuals in this film demand a Blu-ray and frequent freeze framing to appreciate.)

Gone also is the wholesome small-town story arc, and in its place is a strange James Bond knockoff (it’s not faithful enough to be an homage, and Michael Caine was in my mind pretty clearly cast because Sean Connery was too busy golfing in Lyford Cay). To use a seven-time Parsi-ism, this spy story doesn’t really work. It feels forced, and I never really got into it. Finn McMissile (Bond / Caine) is shallowly drawn and his hot pink sidekick isn’t interesting either. They offer some fun on-screen antics and good chase scenes, but as characters they fall flat.

Racing still figures prominently in the film, but any connection to reality is severed in this iteration as a strange chimeric race pits F1 cars against Le Mans-style racers, a WRC car (yes!), touring cars, and others. The tracks include a dirt section (!), an attempted nod to the first film that sets off alarm bells and instantly torpedoes the film’s credibility among car fans. This race series is clearly a thinly-veiled excuse for Pixar folks to render different types of vehicles, which of course they do very well — but at the expense of alienating the very audience that appreciates these renderings in the first place. It’s hard to explain, but when it comes to “realism” — it’s in quotation marks because I’m referring to eyeballs-for-windscreens talking vehicles — the first Cars walked a fine line and came out alright. This one doesn’t.

The biggest surprise and the biggest let-down is Mater, the dumb-luck down-home rustbucket tow truck. The surprise is that he’s actually the star of this movie. The let-down is that he’s fallen victim to Bridget Jones sequel-itis, and has gone from being a bumbling but lovable nincompoop in the first film to a thick-headed, unsympathetic laughingstock whose pratfalls, gauche gaffes, and general cluelessness are neither charming nor particularly entertaining. Mater has become Pixar’s answer to Jar Jar Binks: His character plays like an uncomfortable and insensitive 90-minute send-up of backward country bumpkins. Again, Cars toed this line, Cars 2 blows it.

Lightning McQueen is clearly embarrassed by Mater, and is dismissive, patronizing and downright mean to him at times. Mater responds like a cowed puppy. We’re told that these characters feel love for one another, but we’re never shown why. Five year old memories from Cars don’t suffice, here; we need to see evidence that these two are still friends, and to be given some reason why they should be. What was the strongest character bond in Cars here plays as the weakest.

A last-minute attempt to rehabilitate Mater’s character by painting him as some sort of savant fails utterly, and ends up just piling on what by this point is fairly cutting mockery. And McQueen’s inevitable realization that Mater is “perfect as he is” comes off as unjustified, overdone and desperately codependent. The emotional scaffolding so common to Pixar films is strangely absent here. If this is the alternative, fine: I miss Cars’s whack-a-mole reliance on proven tropes and plot points. (That what you wanted to hear, Lasseter?)

So, I’m conflicted. Cars 2 is unquestionably gorgeous, and it has its moments (pretty much every nod to Japanese culture, for instance, is hilarious and well done). But it lacks the emotional resonance of its predecessor, and surprisingly also lacks Pixar’s characteristic rock-solid, time-tested story to accompany the visuals. Instead, it provides a strange hybrid of a shallow spy movie and a wholly undeveloped racing film replete with shallow characters and anchored in what appears to be the 21st century’s answer to blackface — the “backward redneck.” Story-wise, I didn’t like it much.

Is it worth watching? Yes. It’s strong sauce, an amazing and beautiful visual achievement that still delivers some sharp pop culture references for the adults. But CGI rendering is all about surfaces, and that’s all these characters have. Come on, Pixar: I thought you guys had this formula down.

HAUS VERDICT: Cars 2 redlines its visuals, but stalls its characters and floods its story. See it anyway. 

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s View.