So I unenthusiastically dragged myself to see Cars 3. I thought the first movie was… ok, I guess. Cars 2 was pretty bad and the Non-Pixar Planes spinoffs were about the same. So I’m rather shocked to say that, despite the movie’s best efforts, I kind of thought it was good. Or at least the final act was good and actually surprised me.
The first half to 2/3rds of the movie weren’t terrible but were kind of generic and rambling. It contained sequences that should have been cut for time… but then they couldn’t turn those new characters into toys. The series goes back to being about racing (instead of a spy movie) where Lightning McQueen is getting older and is no longer able to compete with the young up-and-coming racers. After a bad crash, he realizes he has to go back to basics and relearn how to be a great racer. And he’s not going to do it with all that high-technology but with raw guts. Yeah, it’s more of a sports film than the first one and borrows heavily from Rocky 3 and 4.
Now much has been said about the crazy world of Cars (I’ve rambled on about the implications myself and will do so now and later). But in this movie, this mechanical thinking machine is worried about getting older… and he’s being beaten by more streamlined, high-tech cars with lower drag co-efficient and other aerodynamic terms. Well, can’t they give him a new engine? Or change his racing lines, lower his body, etc? He’s a car… wouldn’t he be upgradable?
But, no, he’s not upgradable apparently (though I think the plane in the Planes spinoff was) but he can train to go faster the old-fashioned way. And this is where the movie began to lose me… he’s an aging car and the new cars are built more for speed than him. We are supposed to see this as bad… yet the flick has a bunch of flashbacks to Paul Newman’s ex racing car who is an older model car. McQueen would have easily outclassed him as a race car if they were the same age… So I spent a large part of this movie thinking it’s premise was misguided and confused.
But then the movie pulled a fast one on me that re-contextualized the first 2/3rds… it was a good enough switcheroo that, even if the film was kind of dull and had extraneous content, at least made the premise work. Now, maybe other people could see it coming but I didn’t give the movie’s otherwise kind of lazy script enough credit. Or maybe the twists were in the trailers I didn’t watch. I dunno… it made me like the movie though.
Now, that switch comes at the expense of some seriously bad race logic… bad enough to make me think, hey, I think they are cheating in the big race. Plus I guess how they used the female lead was meant to be empowering but could also be seen as a bad attempt at a feminist message (not that feminism message is bad, but the way they promoted it was, as they say, problematic). So the switcheroo I liked may have worked on one script level but may have failed at another.
That said, the bizarre Cars universe still concerns me. At one point, they give McQueen a new paint job and comment that he’s as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel. This suggests that the ceiling of the actual building must have been painted by a car version of Michelangelo, right? Was he painting upside down on his roof? So what does that look like? Is there an image of a car god reaching a tire out to a car Adam? This also confirms there’s Christianity in the Cars universe… so was there a car Jesus? Was he crucified? Is there an Old Testament full of desert-wandering cars? Is there a car Mohammed?
There’s also a reference to prohibition. Some old racers suggest they were moonshiners back in the day. A lot of stock car racing came out of moonshine running so this makes sense. But this also suggests there was the equivalent of booze and a change to the US constitution that outlawed it. That moonshine was made up in the hills and sold… does this also mean there was a car version of Al Capone and the Untouchables?
Ok fine. Enough of that. Was this movie good. Yeah, it kind of was and I’m more surprised than anything to say that. It wasn’t great and there’s a lot of finger-tapping to get through some of the more stretchy bits of the flick. It could have been a good thirty minutes shorter. But I think that it ultimately says something interesting for a kids movie designed to sell toys and theme park attractions. And I was surprised that it managed to pull it off. So, yeah, better than the other movies in the series.
Score: 76