'Cars 2' Turning Pixar in the Wrong Direction

With Pixar's 12th film, on its 25th anniversary, the vaunted animation studio has finally released its first true disaster—Cars 2. Sure, the kids will love it, but the movie totally fails to understand what was good about the first film, or what's great about Pixar itself.

The studio is coming off one of its best stretches—Up and Toy Story 3 have both been instant classics—while the studio's signature director, John Lasseter, is back for the first time in several years as well. But Cars 2 has the feel of a desperate cash-in in a way that neither Toy Story sequel ever did. Cars 2 is the first Pixar film that was sincerely made to sell toys first.

The original Cars, which came out in 2006, is considered by most critics to be the weakest Pixar movie, but I always liked it a lot. I enjoyed its celebration of American car culture and lost small-town Americana and the Owen Wilson-voiced Lightning McQueen is a likable, engaging hero.

My 3-and-1/2-year-old nephew agrees. He watches Cars three or four times a day, before retiring to his Lightning McQueen race car bed.

I also loved the way the first movie established its world—a universe in which all people are cars, and all cars are sentient. The way it zoomed into a speedway in the opening scene, and we realize that all the fans in the crowd are cars, too.

Cars 2 throws that all in the crapper.

For reasons that remain utterly mysterious, McQueen isn't even the protagonist—that honor falls to Larry the Cable Guy's Tow Mater character. Why the filmmakers decided to turn the second movie over to an unfunny, one-note character—one voiced by the worst comedian in the planet—I will never understand. Meanwhile, nearly all of the supporting characters from the first movie are shunted to the sidelines.

The plot is an utter jumble that no little kid will possibly follow. McQueen is competing in an international Grand Prix series of races in several cities. One is organized by a T. Boone Pickens-like oil tycoon (voiced by Eddie Izzard) who has suddenly embraced green energy, but whose motives may not be pure.

The other side of the film is a spy tale, going all-in on the car fetishization of the James Bond movies, featuring Bond stand-in Finn McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine) and Bond Girl Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer).

Doing it this way makes a huge mess of the premise, as the awful Mater character, mistaken for a spy, dominates the movie while the McQueen and McMissile halves are so disconnected that the movie decides to introduce the two to each other for the first time about two minutes from the end.

I can't possibly undersell how witless the spy subplot is—it's like a James Bond film in which nothing interesting happens, and Bond is the third banana in the cast. It's bad enough that Bond is already probably the most over-parodied piece of pop culture in history, but it especially fails here for three reasons:

• It does nothing original with the premise.
• It's sort of hard to parody Bond without the use of sex jokes.
• The movie's target audience —little kids—don't know who James Bond is.

In addition, after the astonishingly bold incinerator sequence in Toy Story 3, in which the characters all come together to face their mortality, it's sort of disconcerting when we see casual assassination attempts against the various car characters. Toy Story 3 earned that, but Cars 2 did not.

And while "Toy Story 3" used 3-D masterfully, "Cars 2"'s use of the technology is so nondescript that I stopped noticing it about 10 minutes into the film. I don't know that a single 3-D release this year has been worth the premium, but 2-D is especially recommended for this one.

I know what you're thinking—"This movie isn't for you; it's for the kids." And yes, the kids will probably like it. But the beauty of Pixar is that they've always made films that kids and adults can both enjoy, sometimes for different reasons, and sometimes the same. Cars 2 is the first one that doesn't succeed on both levels.

Cars 2, directed by John Lasseter and starring the voices of Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, John Turturro, Eddie Izzard, Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer. Rated G; 1 hour 53 minutes.

Cars 2 is now playing at:

UA King Of Prussia Stadium 16 & IMAX, 300 Goddard Blvd., King Of Prussia.

AMC Plymouth Meeting 12 494 W. Germantown Pike, Plymouth Meeting.

Regal Marketplace at Oaks Stadium 24, 180 Mill Road, Oaks.

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