Cars 2 Review

Cars 2 Review

Pixar is known for its great animation, its clever and inventive stories, and its creative characters. They have defined their brand with quality. Each and every movie they have made has been top quality, and Cars 2 is no exception.

The first Cars was my least favorite Pixar movie.  I wasn't a huge fan of the idea of personifying cars, and lets be honest the story was a blatant rip off of the Michael J. Fox classic Doc Hollywood. I thought it was good, even the worst Pixar film is better than most other movies, but in my opinion Cars was not really their best work.

Pixar has stated that unless there is a good reason, a creative reason, there will not be sequels to their films.  This philosophy has served them well. Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 are great movies first, and sequels second. Cars 2 continues this trend.  The creators purposely avoided the pitfalls of making a traditional sequel and instead push the story in a wonderful new direction.

The direction they decided was brilliant. At its core Cars 2 is a spy thriller, with more in common with James Bond than with Nascar. They don't ditch the racing, but rather than focus on the racing which would have been admittedly repetitive, Cars 2 gears itself towards action and adventure.  Cars 2 is a much more exciting film than the first one. Just like a Bond movie, Cars 2 is full of car chases, tire to tire combat, and some very exciting action sequences.  The creators took this world they created in the last movie and purposely chose do something different with it.  There are several blatant, and brilliant nods to James Bond, Austin Powers, and many other classic spy films.

The plot is driven this time not by Lightning McQueen, but by Mater, the innocent, childlike redneck tow truck. Mater has unwittingly become the spy who knew too little. Aided by two British Intelligence agents, an Austin Martin named Fin McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine) and a Jaguar XJR-15 named Holly Shiftwell (voiced by Emily Mortimer), Mater must help save the world from a diabolical syndicate called LEMON. LEMON is of course comprised of famous clunkers, like Gremlins, Pintos, and other commonly known jalopies. Of course all of the makes and models of the cars fit perfectly with their stereotype characters.

One of the more interesting plot points was the concept of Big Oil using alternative fuels as a catalyst for controlled change.  If oil companies control alternative fuels then we remain at their mercy. Should these oil companies decide that alternative fuels aren't profitable, then we likely won't see change anytime soon. But maybe I am reading too much into the political subplot, maybe the creators just like in the Bond films made a villain interested in world domination, which in the world of Cars, would of course be control of petroleum products.

Overall Cars 2 was a fun and exciting movie.  It expanded the world of Cars, and allows for any number of stories to take place, and also allows the creators an opportunity to play with genre in a whole new way. Maybe we will get a Cars version of a comic book movie, or a science fiction thriller. The possibilities are now endless.