Cars 2 (2011)

Film: Cars 2 (2011)
Stars: Larry the Cable Guy, Owen Wilson, Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, John Turturro, Eddie Izzard
Director: John Lasseter
Oscar History: Cars 2 made history as the first Pixar movie not to receive an Oscar nomination in any category.  It did get nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film at the Golden Globes, though, so you know it was close.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're going to move back to conventional animated films, and what says conventional animation better than Disney, or rather in this case, Pixar?  This could just be the kind of accounts I follow on Instagram, but a lot of people seemed to be trying to see all of the Pixar movies or all of the Disney movies over quarantine, and while I haven't done that, I do have it as a goal to at the very least someday see all of the Pixar and Disney films, and since I was two short for the former, I recently accomplished that task.  Today is the penultimate of those films (logic will dictate which one of the films was the last one, and thus which one we'll be getting to later this week), and anyone who knows the reputations of Pixar films will understand why this one was one I waited upon-it is generally considered the worst of the Pixar movies.  Going into it, I was curious just how bad it could be, and if perhaps its egregious reputation might save it based on lowered expectations.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place after the events of Cars, with Lightning McQueen (Wilson), now a champion, but still mourning the loss of his mentor Doc Hudson (Paul Newman had passed away since the first film was lensed).  However, being on the top always comes with those wanting to take down your throne, and he is challenged by Francesco Burnoulli (Turturro), to a new multi-city race, run by an organic biofuel company.  However, in different legs of the race, there are cars that are crashing, from some sort of sabotage from an evildoer who is unknown for the bulk of the film, and by mistaken identity, the main car that is trying to unveil the criminal mastermind is clumsy, mumbling Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), whom spies Finn (Caine) and Holley (Mortimer) have allowed into their covert operation.

The film is silly, but I'll be real here-I don't get the hate for this movie that it received on its first outing.  I think it might have been more a combination of Pixar having made four true masterpieces in a row (Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3) and thus not only having impossible standards, but also people tend to want to tear down successful enterprises.  We don't allow anyone to enjoy unencumbered success forever, and so if you're basically flawless outing-after-outing, when you make a mistake, it's going to become pronounced.  This is what happened here.  Had Cars 2, say, come out in 2015, when Pixar had already stumbled with Monsters University and The Good Dinosaur, it'd be greeted with a different reception.

That said, it's not great.  The decision to put the popular side character Mater front-and-center makes sense from a marketing standpoint (keep in mind that for a time there the Cars franchise rivaled Disney Princess in terms of ubiquity at your local Wal-Mart), but it doesn't work in the film.  Mater is too bumbling, his schtick gets old pretty quickly, and there's not enough to keep the film grounded.  In a lot of ways it's what would have happened had Frozen 2 made the film entirely about Olaf.  It's not great-there are funny moments in the film, but it's juvenile, and lacks the gravitas of Pixar's best outings, and the cuteness of its more sophomoric installments.  Despite the film's relatively low box office (compared to other hits of that era), it still was able to spawn not only a sequel, but in 2013 with Planes, an entirely different franchise.