Cars 2 Movie 2011 Review :
In the world of Cars and now Cars 2, there live only transportation vehicles, no humans. All the cars, trucks, planes, trains, boats, etc. talk and have human personalities. Their world is just like ours, only with a machine industry spin (for instance, there’s a movie called The Incredimobiles instead of The Incredibles. Get it?).
I’m fully aware the Cars movies are supposed to be fun, silly and are aimed chiefly at kids and families, but alas, their world is simply one I cannot accept. It leaves me with too many burning questions. For instance, how did the very first car come to be? Who built it? How are the cars able to feel? Do they reproduce? Give birth? Who constructed all the buildings we see in these movies, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Are we supposed to believe a car did all that?
You’re probably thinking I have no business asking such questions about a movie with talking cars in it, not least because it makes no claims to be realistic, and because its primary function is to awaken the child inside me. But as an adult, I can’t help but crave some level of rationalism and ask why things are the way they are. I suppose I could have looked beyond all this if the Cars movies did a better job of winning me over with their stories, but here we are.
How could Pixar go so wrong with the Cars movies when they went so right with Toy Story, Ratatouille and Up, among others? The Cars movies seem to be the only instances where the filmmakers patronize the audience with cheap humor and puns instead of original, emotionally charged stories that are creative and unexpected. It’s rare to call a Pixar movie trite and predictable, or worse yet, cheap and derivative, but that’s unfortunately what Cars 2 is.
Like the original, the sequel is mostly a series of tired jokes and routine misadventures that drive the plot around a hackneyed moral lesson. Kids will probably love it in spite of this because it’s got bright colors, fast action and all their favorite characters are back from the first movie. But I think they would have liked it even more had it told a more imaginative story. All people appreciate good stories, and kids are simply little people. Movies like Cars 2 shouldn’t sell them short.
