Cars 2 (2011)

I guess it has to be done.  Let's take a look at Cars 2.

The Movie:

Cars 2 is the 12th movie from Pixar, and the final film directed by John Lasseter before he moved exclusively to producing.  (Lasseter has recently stepped away from Disney and Pixar.)  With this movie, Cars became only the 2nd Pixar movie to have a sequel, after Toy Story, which had already had two sequels.  Cars 2 came after a string of successful Pixar films, including four straight winners of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature (Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3), with the last two having received Best Picture nominations.  Given all this, Cars 2 was seen as a big let down.  Some fans felt that there were several other Pixar movies more deserving of a sequel.  Some people viewed it as a cash grab by Disney, since Cars merchandise was among their biggest sellers, but that was more likely just another reason Disney was ok with the movie.  In reality, Cars was the pet project of Lasseter, and the sequel idea came straight from him.  Cars 2 is still the only Pixar film listed as "rotten" on Rotten Tomatoes.  (It sits at 39%.  The next lowest are Cars 3 at 68% and Cars at 74%.  In contrast, 14 of Pixar's 20 films rank at 92% or higher.)  Cars 2 is also the first Pixar movie not to receive an Oscar nomination of any kind.  However, it did make a ton of money, so at least some people liked it.

Since I'm already spending too much time on this movie, let's get going.  The main protagonist of Cars 2 is actually Tow Mater.  Lightning McQueen has won his 4th consecutive Piston Cup, and Mater is looking forward to spending the off season with his friend.  That includes turning down the chance to race in the World Grand Prix, an event created by Sir Miles Axelrod to show off Allinol, his new alternative fuel.  On a call-in TV show, Italian car Francesco Bernoulli taunts McQueen, prompting Mater to call in and defend him, upon which McQueen accepts the challenge.  McQueen and the crew head to Tokyo for the first race, and at an event there, an American spy passes on some top secret information to an unwitting and unaware Mater.  Mater soon finds himself caught up in a spy case with British agents Finn McMissile and Holly Shiftwell.

Boy, this film is a mess.  Remember how the first Cars caused problems when you really started to analyze the world of the movie.  Well, this movie amplifies those problems significantly.  And if you start to extrapolate some of the events of this movie to actual human counterparts, they get disturbing pretty quickly.  Most of the characters of the first movie get cheated of screen time, as they are soon relegated to the B plot, leaving Mater to carry the A plot.  However wonderful it is to spend more time with Michael Caine (who voiced McMissile), when that means you have to spend more time with Larry the Cable Guy's Mater, that doesn't help.  Mater as a character works fine as a side character or the focus of a short, but we don't need a whole movie with him as the focus.  In fact, I might have been a little more ok with just a straight up James Bond movie set in the world of Cars with all new characters, but what we get here is just an odd mash between the two, and it really doesn't work.

Michael Giacchino did the score for this movie, and he puts together a decent James Bond ripoff.  The only problem is that he already did a much better one with The Incredibles.  Brad Paisley, who did a couple of songs for the first movie, does a couple for this one as well, one of which, "Collision of Worlds," is a duet with Robbie Willams.  None of the songs are that memorable, but it should be noted that this is a Cars movie with a song first recorded by The Cars ("You Might Think," covered here by Weezer).

Presence in the Parks:

We've already discussed most Cars stuff in the parks.  As a unique reference to this movie, Finn McMissile does have a card in the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom.