Pixar Pint #12: Cars 2

No sugar-coating it: this movie sucks! But just how bad is it?

Welcome back to Pixar Pints, our summer-long journey through all 25 Pixar films in release order.

I’m not gonna beat around the bush: this is Pixar’s first truly, unquestionably bad movie. The reason why is the subject of a decent amount of debate. Many moviegoers chalked it up to Pixar (or Disney, now its owner) being greedy. They’d just seen their star franchise, Toy Story, gross over a billion dollars the year prior with a highly anticipated sequel people had wanted for years.¹ It stands to reason that they’d want, no pun intended, lightning to strike twice.

The other major theory, and the one I personally subscribe to, is that this movie was just a vanity project for John Lasseter, the director of Cars and, at the time, the chief creative officer of Pixar. Most Pixar movies have a point. The creative team comes up with an original story with dynamic characters and touching moments to relay some important life lesson or moral. Not Cars 2. By Lasseter’s own admission, this movie exists because he thought it would be funny to make Lightning and Mater travel the world.

And so after Cars came out, I was doing publicity all around the world and had Cars' characters on the brain. And, so every place I went, I kept looking out the window and found myself laughing and thinking, "What would Mater and Lighting McQueen be doing in these situations?" Like getting lost on the streets of Tokyo, which are so confusing. The huge roundabout around Arc de Triomphe in Paris. How anybody could try and maneuver through that would get stuck for days. Driving on the wrong side of the road on the Autobahn with no speed limit. In Italy, with all of those little scooters all around you like gnats. And so I thought that if I had the chance to do another Cars movie, I'd love to take them out of the United States and travel around the world, where there's so much opportunity.
— John Lasseter to Animation World Network, 4/19/2011

Regardless of how this movie came to be, the general consensus is that it should not have.

Let’s get into it.

Cars 2 quick facts

Release date: June 24, 2011 | Director: John Lasseter | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Larry the Cable Guy (Mater), Owen Wilson (Lightning), Michael Caine (McMissile), Emily Mortimer (Shiftwell), John Turturro (Francesco), Eddie Izzard (Axlerod)

John Ratzenberger as: Mack again

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $559.8 million

Academy Awards: None. Not a single nomination. It had to settle for a Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Film, which it lost to Paramount’s The Adventures of Tintin.

Eli

This is the first time I'd seen this movie all the way through.

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Big improvement over Cars. Gotta be the most dynamic Pixar movie to date in terms of scenery and set locations. The newly-introduced character designs are a mixed bag; Shiftwell is pretty neat but McMissile is kind of blah and some of the villains are too similar to each other to avoid mixing them up. The film has enough fun visual gags and gimmicks to make up for its few aesthetic pitfalls.

Animation: 6/10 | Oh boy, is this hectic. There's a baseline of quality Pixar couldn't sink below if they tried, but as a viewer, you're distracted from almost every scene by a seemingly endless barrage of gunshots and explosions and rocket fire. Basically just a cheat code for making your really dumb movie seem exciting.

Story: 0/10 | Pixar's worst story to date, bar none. The twist is nonsensical for multiple reasons and comes out of nowhere as Mater uses knowledge the viewer cannot possibly have to come to his conclusion. The primary moral of "be yourself no matter what" is both wrong (public places usually require manners that Mater doesn't use) and feels unearned at the end of the movie because Lightning has no arc at all. I'm far from being a pearl-clutcher, but this move is excessively violent in ways that feel entirely unnecessary and make me wonder how on Earth it got a G rating—The Incredibles uses violence correctly; in Cars 2 it just feels gratuitous. More than anything, though, this story is just chock-full of bullshit, of stuff that makes absolutely no sense except that it has to because movie. I spent most of the movie laughing for the wrong reasons.

Characters: 2/10 | I gave Cars a 5 here and, man, that ensemble looks like Toy Story 3 in comparison to this garbage. Every returning character is written worse, Flanderized, or both. This is Mater's show, so Lightning is reduced to a supporting actor and he really just brings nothing to the table. As for Mater, he's either a total dunce or a supergenius depending on what the movie requires he be at that exact moment; I wish they didn't make him such an idiot for half of the movie because seeing a common tow truck be so useful in the movie's very uncommon scenarios is fun and honestly endearing. McMissile and Shiftwell...they sure are British spies, alright. They've got the combined personality of a cantaloupe and apparently the brain of one too given they can't figure out Mater isn't really a spy until the climax despite him botching every field mission to that point and repeatedly insisting he isn't supposed to be there. Axlerod is an F-tier villain because his motivation is crackbrained. Francesco is the most basic "racing rival" archetype ever; I could have written him. I know Paul Newman died but I really wish they would have recast Doc.

Acting: 6/10 | I thought Larry the Cable Guy was good in Cars and I think he's just as good, if not better, here; he's actively fun to listen to and, given Mater has so much dialogue, the movie is better for it. Owen Wilson's Lightning is fine but the dialogue they give him is so basic and, honestly…bad…that his acting seems worse than it really is. Michael Caine is a legend but he phoned McMissile in pretty hard, and Emily Mortimer's performance as Shiftwell is so unremarkable that Cars 2 isn't even mentioned on her Wikipedia page.

Music: 3/10 | Another nothing-burger Pixar score with almost no notable cues, followed by two decent Brad Paisley songs in the end credits. This franchise should be scored by Randy Newman and Randy Newman only.

Final score: 4/10 | The seal of A Bug's Life is finally broken, but if I'm being truly honest, while I think A Bug's Life is a better film than Cars 2, I'd be more likely to rewatch the latter because most of the runtime is in "so bad it's good" territory. It's funny on accident enough to make up for rarely being funny on purpose.

Leah

Aesthetic: 7/10 | These are the most impressive backgrounds Pixar has put out so far. Getting multiple cities to look this good isn't an easy feat. I'm still not one for the car aesthetic though.

Animation: 6/10 | The animation was fine. Nothing really wowed me. I think the character designs of the cars are limiting in how you can push them to move.

Story: 1/10 | Honestly, this story was just a huge mess. So many of the plot points were nonsensical; it felt more like this was about making a cool spy movie with cars than making any kind of meaningful narrative. I know I gave the first Cars a hard time for going easy on the oil companies, but was this really the best they could come up with? One of my biggest gripes is that this movie is ableist as hell. You're really going to make the cars with mechanical problems your main villains with the motivation that they've been marginalized by society? This is the group you want to associate with big oil? My god, think about the implications of what you're writing, Pixar. I can appreciate the moral of "don't judge people based on appearances or stereotypes" but I don't think it was executed well here. Mater did commit several social faux paus, but it never seemed like he learned from them or that he should have learned from them.

Characters: 2/10 | Eh, I didn't really care that much about anyone in this movie. The original cast was hardly present outside of Mater and Lightning, and Lightning just seemed like a vehicle for the plot. His character was bland and predictable. Mater's schtick got old real quick. The spies were completely inobservant for secret agents, and what the heck was that ending with Shiftwell as Mater's girlfriend?

Acting: 6/10 | They did the best they could with what they had.

Music: 4/10 | The spy music at the beginning was cool, and that was the only thing I found noteworthy musically. Huge step down from the original Cars.

Final score: 3/10 | Ableist themes, gratuitous violence, nonsensical plot... this movie lives up to all the complaints. All those pretty backgrounds for this?

Maddy

Aesthetic: 7/10 | Honestly a nice looking movie. Making London cloudy and grey for the final act is kinda dumb though.

Animation: 5/10 | There is inherently nothing wrong here. It’s car animation. It’s fine. Go crazy!

Story: 1/10 | Why is it a spy movie? Why is Mater the plot driver? Why is there a kill count? Why is it this poorly written and paced? Why was this made? Why?? John Lassater is a bitch and I don’t care if his name isn’t spelled right.

Characters: 2/10 | I hate everyone in this movie. Mater is dumbed down to oblivion. Lightning is an even BIGGER asshole. The spy cars are generic. The villains are villains. Who is Axlerod? No one in this movie is likable.

Acting: 5/10 | The characters sucking ass affects this ranking. Larry the Cable Guy is annoying. Owen Wilson is ???. Everyone else is okay at best. Nothing really stands out.

Music: 3/10 | It’s so generic. It’s so boring. I miss the Cars score and its western twang.

Final score: 23/60 or 3/10 | Like, it’s bad. It’s not good. It’s such an amazing misstep for this company. Some people say this would be a middle-of-the-pack DreamWorks movie. That’s disrespect to DreamWorks. This movie is hot trash.

Fun Maddy note: A car is crushed to death in this movie. Is that murder? Are there laws in this universe? Can you crush a car to death and escape any legal responsibility? I would like to know.

David

Aesthetic: Honestly? This kinda slaps. I love what they did with locations. I think some of the background characters get a little samey, but on the whole, they've taken huge jumps forward and it really becomes evident here.

Animation: It's a lot. Like. Wow. Michael Bay, is that you? I think, given the relative limitations of the world, this is actually pretty okay, but not to the level that we've seen Pixar be able to attain.

Story: Hahahahahahaha. Lol. Lmao. Uh. They kill a car? It's a spy movie involving possibly the worst spy of all time - but it's a lot less funny than say, Get Smart. I think it just missed the mark with basically everything it was trying to do - and it was trying to do way too much at that. What made Cars so brilliant was its focus on racing - but also the way it humanized the cars themselves and made a story out of Lightning's growth. This is just a terrible straight-to-DVD sequel that escaped the confines of its prison.

Characters: A Mater-centric movie is exactly as irritating as you think it would be. That said, the fancams of this movie with Russian rap are honestly phenomenal, and make me appreciate this shitshow significantly more. The cameos from NASCAR figures and people around the world of racing were neat to me when I first saw this, and they remain really neat now. It's one of the things I've always appreciated about this series - their complete willingness to embrace the sport of racing in real life, as much as the drivers themselves don't always nail it.

Acting: They sure tried! I'm not gonna ding them too hard here, because I think they did what they could with what they had - which wasn't much.

Music: Meh. Nothing really of note here, which is a massive step backwards from the banger-laden soundtrack to the original Cars film.

Final score: 3/10 | Here's the thing. This is objectively a terrible movie. It's among the bottom five in Pixar's catalog, and last of the films we've seen so far. The story is nonsensical at best, the characters alternate between papier-mâché facsimiles and terrible stereotypes, there's no real focus on the actual racing... and yet, I can't help it. I had a fucking blast rewatching this. It's so bad that it swings back around to being...not good, but fun. So, despite this getting a 3 from me, don't write this one all the way off.

Final notes

It’s not a good movie!

Next up: Brave

1. It’s worth mentioning that Cars 2 had been in production since 2008. It’s not like Disney-Pixar rushed this film out after seeing the success of Toy Story 3 firsthand.