Cars 2 Review: It Went Off the Track and Annoyed This Mama

As you know, we were all super excited for the release of Cars 2. In fact, both Monica and Shannon wrote posts about some of the fun (and many) Cars 2 licensed products. My own son watched Cars more times than I care to admit. He nearly had a heart attack when he had his picture taken with Lightning McQueen and Mater at Disney, went through a phase where he only called me “Sally” and only answered to “McQueen”, and for some reason still yells “Go Cars!” when he jumps in a pool. My son was literally counting down to opening weekend and, I admit, I was excited to see it as well. I loved the original movie, the story was great and the movie was appropriate for the target audience with plenty of action and character-driven plot to keep parents happy, too. Cars 2? Not so much.

I wasn’t going to post about the movie, but the more I’ve talked about it with friends and family the more annoyed I am. So here’s my beef: Cars 2 involves a rather complex spy / secret agent / oil politics plot line which has no place in a Pixar children’s movie. To satisfy the spy story line, cars are chased, blown up, and killed. To tell the spy story, most of the original characters from Cars are barely in the movie. As someone mentioned in our Facebook conversation about the movie, most of the original characters you love from Radiator Springs feel more like cameos and not characters in the movie. I missed Sally!

The animation in the movie is breathtaking. I loved the scenes from the World Grand Prix races, and wish we’d seen more of them. The movie could have achieved the same “Mater is goofy, but he’s still a good friend” lesson while focusing more on the races, keeping the action on the road and appropriate for kids. There was so much potential for storytelling involving the original characters that I really don’t understand why the writers went with a story that was too much. Too much violence, too complex, too political and too unrelated.

Think about the Toy Story movies compared to Cars and Cars 2. Toy Story continued to tell a character-driven story with essentially the same characters for three movies. The Cars franchise ran off the track with Cars 2 and we may not get back on if there’s a Cars 3. In fact, I would sooner leave my child alone with a case of chocolate milk, my credit card and a subscription to PartyBingo.com, than take him to see Cars 3. I can only imagine how they’ll “up the ante” for the 3rd installment.

Did you see Cars 2? What did you think?