By David Ross. THE PITCH: Hayseed tow-truck gets mixed up in international espionage. Strange alternate universe in which cars behave like people. No explanation. Kind of creepy.
THE SKINNY: Cars 2 brings Pixar’s exuberant twenty-five-year spree to a grinding halt. Call it a mid-life crisis. The problem is not moral – the usual descent into greed, cynicism, and indifference – but conceptual. The plot is a confused and hyperactive whirlwind of genre elements and action sequences, perhaps amenable to the ADHD generation, but constantly preventing the film from taking emotional or moral root. Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, and Toy Story 3 – Pixar’s three incontestable masterpieces – are likewise action oriented, but they have a certain organic rhythm, a pattern of pause and eddy. They feel human, in short, while Cars 2 rushes in unremitting machine rhythm, much like a NASCAR race.
WHAT WORKS:
• Pixar’s technical genius has reached new and incredible heights. In the opening sequence, Finn McMissile – a 007-style Aston Martin played by Michael Caine – plunges off an oil derrick into a stormy ocean. The rolling, frothing, thoroughly natural wave dynamics are pure geek showboating. Pixar has evidently conquered all the primary technical challenges of computer animation: water, fire, wind, hair.
• Larry the Cable Guy is full of hillbilly fun as the loyal bumpkin Mater. Olivier he’s not, but then again he’s playing a buck-toothed tow-truck. Apprenticeship with the Royal Shakespeare Company not required.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
• In my un-American, dubiously male opinion, cars have ruined the world with their noise, pollution, and facilitation of urban-suburban sprawl. Imagine a time when it was possible to open one’s front door, pick a direction, and walk for twenty miles without fear of being flattened or suffocated in toxic fumes. In light of which, a world consisting entirely of cars – a world that is already ours in some sense – is intrinsically obnoxious and unsettling. How about a world consisting of humanoid retroviruses? Anthropomorphized Iranian centrifuges?
• Much has been made of the film’s ostensible attack on ‘Big Oil,’ but the plot is so confused that anything as definite as an ‘attack’ is hard to discern. Let me try to summarize: Miles Axlerod – a Richard Branson type – has invented an alternative fuel, but a consortium of lemons (Gremlins and the like) is scheming to sabotage the race cars testing the fuel – Lightning McQueen included – because 1) they resent all non-lemons, and 2) they own the world’s largest reserves of petroleum. But then it turns out that Sir Axlerod … well, I won’t spoil anything. Suffice it to say that no seven-year-old will have the least notion what’s going on. Comprehension depends on subscriptions to both The Economist and Car and Driver.
• The film’s Simpsons-esque allusiveness will largely bewilder any plausible child viewer. Gremlins, wasabi, micro-electrical Japanese toilets, etc., do not belong to the kiddy frame of reference. Pixar has always engaged in adult-oriented cultural parody, but in this case the parody feels like an attempt to pump interest, CPR-style, into a moribund story. The film has the dense, manic air of a story that does not trust in itself.
• Do we really need clichéd and extraneous torture scenes in kids’ movies? It’s the usual thing: good guy strapped to a chair, threatened with indescribable pain and death. What parent is going to say, with that excited voice meant to pique a kid’s interest, “Oh Look Suzy, this is how you deploy unconscionable violence to break a man’s soul!”
• Has modern Hollywood ever conceived a villain who is not British? Its vision of evil amounts to this: upper-class British accent = sadistic but intelligent connivance. Are the rolling hills and charming views of the Cotswolds really such an incubator of ruthless depravity? Is gently moldering Oxford really ground-zero for nefarious plots of world conquest? I’m sure the tradition of demonizing the British goes all the way back to the Revolution, but all the same I feel irked that the land of Jane Austen has become the land of Jeremy Irons and his imitators. Recall, for irony’s sake, Austen’s little admonition in Northanger Abbey:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Pixar has celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with a lemon of its own. Nobody will be acutely pained, but nor will anybody float from the theater in a mood of elated confidence in the creative capacity of mankind. Call it a B+. It’s still better than Shrek.
For more on Pixar, see my comments on Toy Story 3 and The Pixar Story.
Posted on July 5th, 2011 at 10:38am.
In my un-American, dubiously male opinion, cars have ruined the world with their noise, pollution, and facilitation of urban-suburban sprawl.
Dhem’s fightin wurds right thar!!
I agree about the film. Pixar has labored to produce an average Dreamworks quality film.
And if there were no cars, your lovely walk down the country lane would be interrupted every 200 yards so you could scrape the horse dung off your shoes.
Hippie. ; )
That Jane Austen quote is on point. Hollywood can think of other villains (corporate America, the CIA, etc.), but when it comes to villains who are supposed to be more sophisticated, they’re usually British. I wonder how the Brits feel about this? It’s lazy thinking on the part of the writers. The animation is great though.
I think the thing that’s most disappointing about Cars 2 is that it felt like a movie that any studio could have made. It’s also know it’s unrealistic to expect Pixar to hit it out the park every time and I certainly like some Pixar movies better than others. I do hope this is a aberration and not the beginning of a trend. To say the least, Pixar’s next effort “Brave” is going to have large expectations to wash the taste of Cars 2 out of our mouth.
I think the Ugly American saves the day overtakes the evil Big Oil plot.
I think that’s the moral of the story, as Lightning is ’embarrassed’ by Mater’s behavior when out of the country, but comes to realize that Mater is at his best being himself.
However, it, too gets lost in this morass of confusion that doubles as a ‘plot.’ The only reason I can think of the plethora of evil AMC Gremlins and Pacers is that American Motors no longer exists and can’t sue for defamation.
Oh, well. On to Brave.