Other Reviews in this Series.
Directors: John Lasseter, Brad Lewis (co-director)
Writers: Ben Queen, John Lasseter, Brad Lewis, Dan Fogelman
Cast: Larry the Cable Guy, Owen Wilson, Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Eddie Izzard, John Turturro, others, John Ratzenberger
Runtime: 106 mins.
2011
On Rotten Tomatoes, a critical film review aggregate, the first Cars movie sits at 74% positive reviews. This is already perplexing to me for reasons I enumerated in my review of that pile of greasy turds. But the real curiosity is the plummet of Cars 2 down to 39% positive reviews. I have to wonder about the people who felt favorably about Cars, but were let down by its sequel. The second movie is much like the first, but contorted to fit inside the structure of a very typical international espionage thriller. The best scenes in the film involve newcomer British spies Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). Far more entertaining than watching cars do something they're designed to do (race) is watching them do something they have no business being able to do (covert ops), and this juxtaposition immediately propels the sequel ahead of the first entry in my estimation. Sure, Michael Caine sounds bored, and the plot is cookie cutter stuff that somehow manages to be both simplistic and convoluted, but at least it's something. At times, I felt like I was watching an actual movie, rather than a bunch of anthropomorphic cars farting around and being assholes to each other.
Unfortunately, this being a sequel to Pixar's main merchandising property, the characters from Cars have to be involved.* Unfortunately unfortunately, Pixar has realized that their primary demographic for this franchise are downhome southern redneck conservatives. With that realization firmly in pocket, they upgraded Larry the Cable Guy's tow truck Mater from goof-off sidekick to out and out protagonist.
*During the first scene of the movie, which details Finn McMissile's infiltration of an oil rig, I was blissfully able to pretend that we wouldn't be seeing the likes of Mater and McQueen ever again.
Y'see, in this here movie Mater's goin on the innernational junket with his bestest bud in the whole wide world, Lightnin Maqueen. And don't you know it, but Mater goes ahead and gets caught up in some secret e-spy-o-nage bisness that he don't know nothin about. Dadgum!
Allow me to translate. Lightning McQueen gets called out by a flashy Italian car so he travels to Japan, Italy, and England to race. Mater tags along. Plotwise, Mater gets tied up in all this espionage business because of a contrived sequence of right-place-right-time happenstance. He remains involved because the aforementioned British spies believe him to be so deep undercover that his idiocy appears to them to be excellent spywork. And so Mater bumbles through the film, misunderstanding every single goddamn thing anybody tells him, and his responses happen to be stupid in a way that can be interpreted as intelligence. This coincidental communication via miscommunication is one of the oldest laziest most overplayed comedy tricks in the book, and here it is blown up into the entire plot and also most of the movie's jokes.
Meanwhile, the thematic journey of the film has to do with Mater's dumbass cultural insensitivity. He makes a fool of himself in Japan because he's too stupid to listen to what anyone is saying, so he ends up setting off every mine in the cultural minefield. For example, one of the central jokes of the movie involves Mater asking for some "pistachio ice cream," and he keeps demanding more even though the guy keeps telling him it's wasabi. He slurps it up and his mouth is so hot he causes a huge scene that makes McQueen look bad. He also never takes responsibility for any of this. Yet when McQueen tells him to get lost because his idiocy made McQueen lose a race, we are supposed to feel bad for Mater. This arc ends by, I kid you not, concluding that everyone just needs to respect that Mater has Mater's own culture. A culture of ignorance. And everybody needs to be cool with that. He's not wrong, he's just got a unique perspective. He's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
Ohhhhhhh this is infuriating. The message here is tolerance through the whitest, most male, most sheltered and ignorant lens there is. Just listen to the song that ends the movie, a diddy about multiculturalism sung by two white country singers that fetishizes other cultures, although it can mostly only be bothered with England. It's disgusting.
At the risk of edging into intolerance myself: if you don't understand what's wrong with this song you're probably intolerant. There's the old racism of hating other cultures, and there's the new racism of dismissing other cultures. This idea that they act all funny over there across the pond, but really deep down we're all the same--it disregards the importance of culture in shaping us as humans, and it shirks any responsibility for the pitfalls of your own culture. Mater is the perfect illustration for this. He manages to save the day in the end, but only because of the multitudinous contrivances that the plot requires to make him the hero. He is never asked to take ownership over any of his mistakes; indeed, others apologize to him for criticizing his actions. At one point in the narrative, the spies notice that he is unarmed so they give him a ton of weaponry. I was horrified. This car cannot handle the simplest of tasks, or the simplest of concepts, please do not give him guns. Of course I knew everything would work out because this is a children's movie and Mater is the hero, but the mere thought of this moron traipsing around packing heat that he barely knows how to use made me distraught.
Then of course, at the very end, the eminently capable and talented female spy (who the old white male spy spent the whole movie telling she should BE MORE LIKE MATER ADJKFNLESJLSFNKSJBGROJS) falls for Mater because of... because of... because... why
Cars 2 is better than the first thanks to the spy intrigue alone, but it manages to find new and different ways to be despicable. Like the first, there is not even redemption in its humor. It's not funny. I felt compelled to watch some Buster Keaton after finishing this movie because I had the strong need to see jokes and gags that actually functioned as they are supposed to. Don't let your children see this movie, it will probably teach them to be worse people.
2 / 5 BLOBS
The Short: Hawaiian Vacation
The short is not very good. It's mostly five minutes of "let's watch our favorite characters say the types of things they normally say." It is, however, thematically in keeping with Cars 2: most of the jokes are lazy cultural appropriation. Ken and Barbie want a dream vacation in Hawaii, you see, so the gang acts like they're in Hawaii by parading out all the stereotypes folks have about that storied chain of islands. Come on, people. I would expect this sort of thing from Cars 2, not the short film featured before Cars 2!
2/5
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