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Film Review: Cars 2

Olly Mann rediscovers his inner eight year old but still fails to relate to Cars 2...

By Olly Mann

24 Jul 2011, 11:26

I’d heard that Cars 2 had suffered a pretty comprehensive drubbing from critics in the States,  but decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s not going to be a masterpiece,  I thought, but when all’s said and done, it’s a film aimed at eight year old boys. As evidenced  by its $100 million opening weekend,  eight year old boys are enjoying it. I was an eight year old boy once. Indeed I am pretty familiar with my inner eight year old boy (only a few months ago, I took him to Sea World). So, no bones about it: I was looking forward to this.
 
As is customary in Pixar movies, there’s a delightful hors d'œuvre before the main feature – Hawaiian Vacation, a short starring the characters from the Toy Story franchise. The set-up is that Bonnie (the little girl that Buzz and Woody et al went to live with at the end of Toy Story 3) has departed on holiday but, shock horror, has forgotten to take Barbie and Ken with her. Cue lots of ingenious sight gags as the rest of the toys act out a fake vacation  in Bonnie’s bedroom to provide the plastic sweethearts  with a first kiss they will never forget. It is a six-minute hoot, with all the pathos, visual flair and eye for detail we’ve come to expect.
 
Time for the main feature. I was psyched! And then…
 
…And then the cars started talking to each other. And I got bored. Yes, there was plenty of adventure,  as our heroes Lightning (Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) go zooming around Tokyo and London, vividly animated in eye-popping 3D. There was some excellent voice casting (albeit straight out of the Allo Allo book of national sterotypes) with John Turturro as the arrogant Italian F1 car Francesco Bernoulli, and Sir Michael Caine as the suave four-litre secret agent, Finn McMissile. There were even some gags for the grown-ups, like the VW hippie camper van who appears to have had a toke or two,  and the straight-over-the-kids’-heads  reference to pay-per-view porn.
 
So why was I bored? Perhaps it was the absence of human characters,  which is odd because Pixar’s humans are often the least absorbing presence in their films (Wall-E, for instance, gets a lot less interesting once it abandons the bare dystopian wasteland of Robots on Earth and becomes all Fatsos in Space). But, by not having any human context at all, Cars 2 is rather hard to relate to. Remember how resonantly our childhood fantasies were reflected in Toy Story (‘what do my toys do when I leave the room?’), or Finding Nemo (‘do fish talk to each other in the depths of the ocean?’). By contrast, Cars 2 takes place in a world in which cars run the government,  go to the toilet and work for multinational corporations, completely autonomously, with no humans AT ALL. My inner eight year old never fantasised about that!
 
I admit, Pixar have previously set the bar very, very high. With the likes of UP, The Incredibles and Wall-E – to my mind, amongst the best movies to emerge from any major Hollywood studio in my lifetime – they created stories that spoke to a mass family audience; stories about hope, friendship, bereavement,  desire and the human spirit; stories that were solidy entertaining, visually thrilling and wonderfully funny all at once. In short, they created art.
 
Despite being directed by Disney-Pixar overlord John Lasseter, Cars 2 just ain’t art.
 
But, look. Your eight year old son? He’ll love it.