Review of Cars 2 (2011) by Matthew O — 22 Jun 2016

After what we've been seeing from Pixar over the past decade, you'd think they would keep bringing up all these innovative ideas for years to come, with more new characters, more new stories that we can connect with, and bring their animation to new heights. And what do they make after their most successful film yet? A sequel to their worst film, CARS. Yeah, smart move.

I mean, talk about the biggest step backwards you could take for a studio that was doing so well. I have no idea why they thought that this would be a good idea. Did anyone ask for a sequel to CARS? No. They made it because of the $billions in merchandising, nothing else. Since I didn't care about the first CARS film, I avoided seeing the sequel in the theater. And not surprisingly, the film critically didn't do very well. It became the lowest rated Pixar film to date... by a HUGE margin. I never thought that we would actually have a legitimately bad Pixar movie. Years later, I thought to myself "How bad can it be?" because people have been treating this film like it's one of the worst animated films ever made. I finally watched it on television to see how bad it actually is. When comparing it to other Pixar films, it's absolutely terrible and by far their worst one yet. But among animated films in general, it's not awful.

Don't get me wrong, CARS 2 is a bad movie. The premise they give us seems completely random and out of nowhere, it's basically a spy espionage movie with talking cars. Okay, how did they come up with this idea? What did the first movie even have to do with spies? They seem to have completely ignore the events from its predecessor. Maybe they could bring something innovative to this idea, some new twists, characters, or... I don't know, something new. But we don't. This movie is basically every spy movie you've ever seen. You can predict everything that's going to happen, every joke, every sort of twist and turn, and it makes it so boring.

They introduce so many new characters who we know nothing about, so we don't even care what they do or what happens to them. None of the characters we knew from the first film don't seem to make much of an appearance, not even Lightning McQueen. The only character that they focus a lot more on is Mater, who is now the main character. He was already pretty annoying in the first film, but as the main character, he's almost unbearable. You're basically watching Larry the Cable Guy doing his incredibly forced comedy. If you like him, great, you'll have a lot of fun with this movie.

Though, I can't say that I hate this movie because first of all, I had absolutely no expectations for it at all, and second, the movie is pretty much harmless. It doesn't have any bad morals or anything offensive. And to the film's credit, the animation looks very nice and even some of the action scenes were kind of fun to watch. By the standards of most children's films, it's not that horrible. But if someone told you that this movie is from one of, if not, the greatest animation studio of all time, you can easily see why a lot of people really dislike it. You'd expect so much more effort from them, you'd expect their movies to aim at both the kids and the adults. But it's a movie that's obviously aimed only towards younger kids.

And what really annoys me is that, now that we know that they're actually making a third film, we're going to get an entire CARS trilogy that nobody asked for before we finally get a sequel to THE INCREDIBLES that everybody begged for. I don't know why or what Pixar was thinking.

Grade: D+.