Film review of Cars 2 (2011)- by Ryan O’Toole

Full text transcript of the film review of Cars 2:

That’s going on, guys, Ryan O’Toole back here again, giving you guys another review.

Welcome back to The Journey to Incredibles two. We are continuing on reviewing these Pixar movies were almost done, guys. We’re in the month of June already.

That’s in about less than two weeks. I can’t believe I’m saying those words right now. But anyway, guys, we’re going to be reviewing a new movie. And that movie is Cars To. Directed once again by John Lasseter, starring not Lightning McQueen as the main character, Mader is the main character, Larry, the cable guy, Owen Wilson back as a Lightning McQueen. Also some new additions in there, like Michael Caine, surprisingly. And this is an unnecessary sequel to Cars.

Now, before I give you my thoughts on this piece of shit, I do have a special guest talking about Cars two with me who is not a piece of shit. He is really skyrocketing right now in this community. You all know him. You should know him. Mr. Shawn Chandler talks about Shawn’s going to give you his thoughts on cars, too, first, then I’ll give you my thoughts after. So, Shawn, take it away.

Hey, thanks, Ryan, for inviting me to be on your channel and talk about this movie. Of all the Pixar movies, there’s only a few of them that I’ve only seen one time in Cars. Two was one of the movies that I’d only seen one time a few years back with my son was only like two years old or something like that. So this was kind of fun to go back and watch a movie from Pixar that I had very little experience with and watch it with the new fresh set of eyes, thinking about it from the perspective of I need to review this. With all that said, it’s kind of my background on this movie. Let’s dive into it talking about the good and easily the best thing about this movie, as is the case with all Pixar movies. It’s gorgeous. It just shot in a way that the colors are so vibrant, the designs are so fun. There are going off to, you know, obviously words small town in the first movie, this one, they kind of take it to the world. And so they go to all these fun, vibrant cities. It kicks things off with action sequence where ended up in an oil rig on the water, all sorts of things that are just they do animation very well. They have obviously putting tons of money to make them look gorgeous. And they absolutely are along the same lines.

They always get great voice cast here. And Michael Caine into the mix is this British spy character. That’s great casting. That’s very fun. Casting a nice addition into the mix to kind of stir things up a little bit. And also, as this is a movie about cars doing some fast driving, whether racing or in chases and action sequences, it’s all handled with such exuberance and excitement, energetic sequences. And so this is a movie that’s pretty well filled with entertaining type things, whether jokes, action sequences, it goes for it. And all of it has an energy to it as you go through the film. And so I watched it this go round with my two kids, this go round because I now have two kids and they were in the whole thing up. And they’re the target audience for this film. As a four year old and a six year old, they dug it. Absolutely. We’re having a blast with it. Over the whole weekend since we watched it, they were talking about different action sequences with cars and mater in jet rockets, on cars, all sorts of things. The target audience had a good time with this movie. From there, let’s move on to the bad with this movie. And despite it being gorgeous and having very well choreographed, nicely shot action sequences, this is not a movie that I find enjoyable really at all on any level other than as a father watching his kids have a good time.

And there’s a number of different reasons for that. But just to kind of summarize it, the nature of this movie, what they decided to do with the concept of it as a sequel to the previous movie just feels like direct to video quality storytelling, direct a video quality ideas of how to, like, attract an audience. It feels like just pure schlock to me. And what I mean by that is that there’s serious genre issues with this film. Previous film is about a world full of cars where it’s not people. The cars are the people. And our lead characters, Lightning McQueen, who’s a racer that is crossing the country, breaks down in the small town city. And so he learns about Americana and breaks his ego and trains a little bit and driving all sorts of things. It has a character lesson along the way, but it’s it’s really, in ways, a sports movie about the big famous person getting back in touch with themselves in a small community, but a sports movie of sorts. And it’s there’s other types of movies with this Templer, the movie called Doc Hollywood from the early 1990s with Michael J. Fox, had a story like this in the big city boy getting lost in the small city.

The second movie here still has Lightning McQueen has made her side character gets promoted. Really kind of the lead characters made in this one. There’s some of the premise set up of it is that they’re going on a world tour as Lightning McQueen, going to Europe, going to Japan. That feels like a continuation of the first movie, not necessarily a great plot when it comes to deep emotional themes like the first one touched on certain elements, but it’s a continuation of the driving sports element to it. Then the movie has this other plotline about Michael Keaton as a spine.

And later, becoming an accidental spy in the mix and then being confused, and they think he’s this brilliant person playing the dummy in the soup them up and you get bomb strapped on to him at certain points in time in the movie. This is a massive genre departure. And the only reason the movie kind of gets away with it is because it’s a world of cars. But if you stripped away, just went to the bare bones storytelling of actually what’s going on, not the novelty of their cars in it. This is this is horrible, very schlocky, gimmicky storytelling. This is the equivalent of when Friday the 13th franchise decided, let’s send Jason Voorhees into space when they put out a movie called Leprechaun in Space, when they made a movie called Leprechaun in the Hood.

It’s just taking our genre are our characters and putting them in a different genre. Like what would be a quirky way to get something interesting will make it a spy movie. And my kids will buy that. My kids will be like, Oh, look, Maida’s got rockets on him now. Oh, look at Spy Car. That’s cool. But it’s such a betrayal of the franchise.

It compromises the integrity of the franchise. All the Rocky movies get very silly around the third movie in the fourth movie, very silly movies, very 80s movie. But there’s still sports movies.

There’s still about boxing. In the third one, Rocky boxes. Mr. TEAC from the 80s Mohawk guy pretty silly. Any boxes and wrestler Hulk Hogan. Very silly to do an equivalent here. This is as if in Rocky three instead of rocky boxing. Mr. T, it’s as if Rocky gets recruited by the team and joins with Mr Tehan battling bad guys. It’s as if he joins the super elite team to go battle evil terrorists because he’s a good boxer. So he’s still punching people, still rocky. But now it’s a war movie. Spy movie. That’s what Cars three actually does. It goes from sports movie to a spy movie because it’s not Lightning McQueen that becomes a spy. It’s made accidentally becoming a spy. So it’s more like it. Using our rocky analogy, Holly Rockies’ Gerke stupid drunk brother in law becomes a spy or joins the team or something like that. Just it’s just a ridiculous idea.

This sort of gimmicky. Schlocky what? What’s the most wakan?

We appealed to the most common base, common denominator, base level entertainment for our target audience. That’s not what Pixar does. That’s not what they’ve ever done. They’ve made family entertainment that actually tackles pretty deep emotional ideas. And, you know, right around when this movie came out, you had up you had Toy Story three, you had Wally that are very ambitious. They’re highly emotionally resonant for different ages. And then Cars two comes out and Mater turns into a spy. It doesn’t match the genre. And that’s why to me, this movie feels very much like a directed video type sequel. It’s not really worthy of Pixar. This is gimmicky, schlocky moviemaking kind of at its worst. And that’s in being that it’s in the Pixar canon, kind of embarrassing. All of it feels forced. It’s they’re trying to force the emotion of other Pixar movies into it, and they haven’t earned it the way other Pixar movies did. And so this movie just does not work for me. For that reason, I would rate this movie a C minus on a quality level and an honor, just an entertainment level. For me, this is like a four out of ten is not fully boring. It’s not just painful to watch. It’s not entertaining for me, though, and it’s also not just incompetently made. So it’s not like an F to me. It’s competently made schlock. It’s big budget. How can we entertain kids? I wish I could give it an F just purely on the level of this does not belong in the Pixar canon. It is not worthy of the Pixar name. But in honestly, there is some competence in the filmmaking, so I can’t quite go that low. So that’s my take on the movie. I maybe if you loved it, go in and tell me down in the comments section, I’ll check over on this video and see which I check out what Ryan has to say about it, see what you guys had to say about it. But that’s my take on it. Unfortunately, this is easily my least favorite Pixar movie.

Thank you so much for joining me once again to talk about Cars. Two guys, I’m pretty sure you’re subscribed to Sean Taylor talks about the dudes at forty thousand subscribers. He has a great channel. I’m sure you guys know that. If you don’t know who Sean Taylor talks about is his channel link is in the description below. Go check him out. This dude does a lot of great videos, a lot of great Renkin videos, movie reviews and tons of other movie related stuff. So Cars, too, came out in 2011 right after the masterpiece Toy Story three, which was nominated for Best Picture The. Year and then a year later, we got a sequel to the First Cars movie and not an incredible to watch in Cars two again, it was painful.

This movie sucks. It sucks beyond belief. This movie is not good at all. Do I have any positives with cars, too? In all honesty, no. You could say the animation, but really that’s the easiest praise when it comes to these Pixar movies. The performances in here are so dry. Lightning McQueen, Owen Wilson just continues to be that bland. Lightning McQueen, that’s not really a great main protagonist. Plus, he’s kept to the sideline. He’s a supporting character. And this movie made the dumbest fucking decision in their life to make Mater the main character voiced by Larry the cable guy. Why is he the main character in this movie made her in? This movie is nothing but annoying joke after joke after Joe and he talks nonstop.

Going into the Lightning McQueen are going to be inspired today. And I never could imagine watching an hour and forty five minute movie here.

And that noise, it gets really painful to listen to once you have the new additions. Michael Kainaz, Finnmark Missile and Emily Mortimer as Holly Shift. Well, these two new supporting characters in the film, they’re spies kind of like James Bond ish. Yeah, they’re fine. Michael Caine, why would you bring him into this movie? He had some cool action sequences, but really there’s nothing much to him but a rip off of James Bond, which is another negative. Why did they rip off James Bond in this movie with a spy espionage plot? It’s really dumb. The whole central point of the story is Lightning McQueen traveling the world in the World Grand Prix, where it’s in Japan, that it’s in England and it’s in Paris. Plus, you have another side, part of Mater being a spy in solving these different spy missions with these James Bond cliche villains who are trying to kill Lightning McQueen. It’s just really stupid and unnecessary. They focus on it so much. And it really dragged down the story in the piece and a lot one made the first Cars movie, at least fine and decent were the racing sequences with Lightnin and Doc Hudson. But here it’s completely blinded and wasted. You don’t see a lot of it. And it just really disappointed me as an adult watching this movie. I just like, yeah, this is for kids. Kids will really like the humor in this movie from Mader, I’m sure, Kiran. These jokes now as an adult, it’s so cringe worthy and awkward, especially made pooping out oil in the movie. There’s only one reason why cars, too, was made. It’s to sell toys and make frickin money. This movie didn’t need to be made. The first cars was OK. It didn’t need a sequel or even a trilogy franchise. Incredibles two should have been made right before this movie. Three Cars movies were made before Frickin Incredibles two. That’s sad. That really is sad.

What is wrong with you? Pixar cars too is hands down the worst Pixar movie. Nothing about this film. I like that all re watching it. It’s boring, lazy, stupid, cringe worthy to watch. And if you like cars too, that’s fine. That’s your opinion. I’m glad you loved it. But for me it’s the worst Pixar movie and the worst watchable film. Oh my rating scale cars to get to zero out of five stars. That was my review for cars too. Now what do you guys think of cars too. Did you love it. Think it was ok. Do absolutely hate it. Let me know all your thoughts down below in the comments. Once again, thank you so much, Sean Chandler for talking about cars too with me. And now, up next, guys, in our Pixar filmography, I’m going to be reviewing this brave, which came out in 2012. And joining me for Brave is Durban from Durban. Thank you guys, as always, for watching this review. And if you guys liked it, give it a thumbs up.

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