They said it couldn’t be done. But Pixar proved the yaysayers wrong when it made its first bad movie, “Cars.” Now it has worsted itself with the even more awful “Cars 2.”
This international toy fair and pun emporium billed as a movie relies painfully on the redneckery of Larry the Cable Guy, an alleged but not proven comedian whose country corn-pone act makes Jeff Foxworthy look like Gore Vidal. Mr. The Cable Guy inexplicably has the lead role as the broken-down old tow truck Tow Mater (one of many not-good puns — it’s supposed to sound like a hillbilly saying “Tomato,” I guess).
Owen Wilson’s Lightning McQueen, easily the blandest Pixar hero ever, but not as actively grating as LCG’s character, spends the movie in the background trying to win a worldwide Grand Prix split into races in London, Italy and “Towkyo” (ouch).
Mater keeps embarrassing Lightning with his cracker-barrel goof-ups, but eventually becomes the critical element of a spy plot. He is carrying information sought by a debonair British secret agent car, Finn McMissile (Michael Caine, by far the best thing in this mess), and his assistant, Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). Meanwhile, an eccentric billionaire (Eddie Izzard) who has invented a new alternative fuel he supplies to all of the Grand Prix racers is dismayed to find all the cars that use the new carbon-free fuel blowing up. All of this has something to do with a prologue in which Finn discovers shady goings-on at a deep-sea oil platform.
Much of the comic energy is generated by those dumb puns (karate is “carate,” a sportscaster is Brent Mustangburger) and the strangulating central whim about what would happen if cars ran the world. Occasionally this yields mild amusement — I liked the 10W-40 martinis — but it shouldn’t rule the movie. “Cars” and its sequel are the only Pixar offerings that are based on a gag rather than a story. A lot of the bits don’t even make sense (a cigarette girl who sells air fresheners?), and some of them sound like they could have been written by the average 9-year-old in the audience, such as “You’ll be finished at the finish line!” When Mater is carrying a bomb, Lightning tells him, “You’re the bomb!”
But a London billboard reading “Lassetyre,” a reference to the film’s director, John Lasseter, looks like a typo. Surely they meant Lassetired?
In much the same way that a pleading nightclub comic might say, “Is anyone here from a foreign country?” “Cars 2” makes a show of its globalism, zinging around the planet to mollify important markets — sorry, countries! But any movie that makes you sit through all of (a cover of) the Cars’ “You Might Think” should be cited with international human-rights charges. (Nor does the song have
anything to do with cars.)
Almost as appalling is the closing number about colliding worlds in which Brad Paisley and Robbie Williams sing the merits of coffee versus tea and gasoline versus petrol, but wind up proving that cliché knows no nation.
The various culture check-ins yield nothing more interesting than sumo-wrestling cars, guard-cars wearing bearskin helmets at the entrance to Buckingham Palace and John Turturro’s Luigi Risotto accent as Lightning’s arrogant Italian rival, Francesco.
The message of the film is (ultimately) that Mater should be himself and not worry about how badly he makes everyone around him cringe, particularly in cosmopolitan places. But apart from one moment of improbable brilliance, Mater really is an insufferable moron. In Japan, he ingests heaps of what he thinks is pistachio ice cream (actually wasabi). “Dump trucks is dumb,” he says, and boasts of his martial-arts skills, “I got me a black fan belt!” He accidentally activates secret spy weapons by saying, “Shoot!” With his whistle-through-the-teeth delivery, LCG makes such lines transcendentally irritating.
The one clever notion is that the lemons of the world (the Pacer, the Gremlin, the East German Trabant, one of which was once photographed after the fall of the Berlin Wall sitting comfortably and justly in a Dumpster) are jealous villains trying to sabotage the dream machines. But this idea is awkwardly affixed to the plot about controlling global oil supplies — could rust buckets really master the world? — and anyway, the most prominent clunker on-screen is the main character. Things are so dull, rote and humorless that when signboards in a European scene read “Mondiale Grand Prix,” I at first thought they said “Mondale Grand Prix,” which sounds like an unwanted award this movie could easily win.