By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
Cars 2 demonstrates that not every hit movie merits a sequel.
Disney/Pixar
Up in the air: The race car Lightning McQueen, left (voiced by Owen Wilson), and tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) take flight.
Disney/Pixar
Up in the air: The race car Lightning McQueen, left (voiced by Owen Wilson), and tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) take flight.
Though many of the visuals are winningly vibrant and sleek, what is lacking here is Pixar's most notable characteristic: a compelling, clever story and boundless heart.
The characters ? talking, living cars ? are nowhere near as likable, emotionally rich or complex as the playthings of the Toy Story movies, the rodents of Ratatouille, the undersea creatures of Finding Nemo or the endearing robot of WALL-E.
Where the original Cars (2006) lagged somewhat behind the rest of the exceptional Pixar pack, Cars 2, in computer-animated 3-D, seems to idle in neutral.
The news that the film was directed by John Lasseter, the affable Pixar mastermind who gave us the first Toy Story, raised hopes that this would be another Up or Toy Story 3.
Pixar movies are so much more evolved than most other fare ? animated or live action ? that watching Cars 2 feels like stumbling on a Neanderthal amid a corps of advanced Homo sapiens.
* * 1/2 out of four
Voices: Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, John Turturro, Bonnie Hunt
Directors: John Lasseter and Brad Lewis
Distributor:Walt Disney Pictures
Rating: G
Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Opens Friday nationwide
Race car champ Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) has just returned to Radiator Springs to spend some time with his hometown pals. But almost as soon as he arrives, he's challenged to race overseas in the first World Grand Prix, a contest to determine the world's fastest car. He takes his pit crew buddies along and adds rusty tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), who means well but botches things up for Lightning.
Mater is such an overgrown toddler that he leaks petrol in excitement. (This gussied-up bathroom humor seems a rare effort to pander to very young viewers.) Lightning faces an archrival, Italian race car, Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro), and Mater gets embroiled in a top-secret spy mission at the behest of British super-spy Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and his cohort, Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). Lightning and Mater face a bump in the road when it comes to their long friendship, but the message about loyalty is a sound one.
In contrast to the nostalgia-drenched original, this retread is an amalgam of spy movies, sort of James Bond-lite on auto-pilot.
Though the locales are more far-flung than Radiator Springs, the movie doesn't benefit from the exotic spots and polyglot voices. A lot of locations are raced through, but the events happening in them are less than fascinating.
A few ingenious action sequences benefit from the 3-D technology, but too much emphasis is placed on explosions, high-octane road races and watered-down global intrigue. Mild humor is interspersed. But will young kids follow the convoluted mystery surrounding an oilfield and possibly compromised alternative fuel?
Something Pixar animation has never been is formulaic. But Cars 2 teeters on the brink. It's not that it's a bad film. But the bar is high, and it's lackluster and predictable, missing that alchemic blend of humor, pathos and indelible characters that give Pixar movies their brilliant shine.
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