Cars 2 Review

My mom is off work this week to get their move done but it has gone so well that she had some spare time today, so we took the kids to see Cars 2. I recently read a review (where incidentally, I commented that I probably wouldn't see this movie in the theater) that said that this move was terrible. I will admit that I didn't care for the first movie but I wanted to like this movie. I've had bad luck with movies recently and I would hoping this would break that streak.

I'm glad we went because this was a pretty good movie. MF was excited to see it but WF didn't want to go, insisting that Cars 2 was only for 5 year olds. I showed him a few trailers and he decided that maybe it looked it ok. We got our popcorn and got situated in time to watch a few previews (on a side note, there were only 3 or 4 previews instead of nearly 30 minutes of them so that was happy). The Toy Story short at the beginning of the movie was good stuff. Ken and Barbie miss their Hawaiian vacation so the toys put one on for them.

Cars 2 starts with Lightening off racing and Mater doing his thing in Radiator Springs. Lightening comes back for the summer, but ends up going to the Worldwide Grand Prix with his Radiator Springs pit crew. Once they get to Japan, Lightening is annoyed and embarrassed by Mater's behavior and tells him to stop acting like himself. Mater manages to fall into the middle of an international spy mission and meets a pretty girl in the process. Through several gun battles, a few high speed chases and a few dangerous situations, Mater learns that being himself is just fine. Lightening learns that you take your friends as they come and you shouldn't try to change them and they both come home with a great story to tell.

I'm not a particular fan of spy movies or of car movies but this was bright, fun race around the world. I particularly liked the Tokyo scenes, with the neon and the bright colors. The Italian countryside shots were very pretty as well. I think I would be more inclined to watch actual racing if they were racing in scenes like in this movie. I've heard several people say that the spy plot was convolution and difficult to follow. Personally, I didn't find that to be the case and both kids were able to follow it pretty well. I was also glad to see that Lightening wasn't really the focus of the movie. Lightening has moments of being a decent person but overall he is kind of a jerk and remains as such in this movie. Mater was always a better person and it was fun to see him with his fancy spy gadgets.

I do agree with other reviewers who said that this was a violent movie. There were several large gun battles, explosions, on screen torture, implied character death (they called them on screen deaths but I felt most of them were implied as exposed to explicit, except for the scene were the bad guy said "kill him" and then there was an explosion), etc.

MF proclaimed it the best movie ever and said she wanted to get rid of her Barbie to make room for more Cars 2 stuff. WF said he thought it was pretty good and he really liked the explosions and the spy story line. I thought some of the stuff was over the heads of young children but it was great for my kids (9 and 6) and had enough humor for the adults to enjoy it to. Like all Pixar movies, it was filled with inside jokes and referrals to other movies.

I enjoyed this movie and so did the kids and my mom. This isn't a really movie for the preschool set, especially sheltered preschoolers. This movie was written for first generation Cars fans, who have grown up a little. Bottom line, if a kid wasn't old enough to see the original on the big screen, this movie might not be for them. For older kids and adults, I would rate it as 4 stars out of 5