Slightly longer version of a movie review in the Friday, June 24 Oregonian....
"Cars 2" is probably the slightest of Pixar's films -- it sort of plays like an espionage-driven episode of the '60s "Speed Racer" cartoon, only with the Mach 5 doing all the talking in a universe eerily devoid of humans.
But if it's going to be diet Pixar, at least it's action-packed diet Pixar -- with overwhelming, detail-choked production design that occasionally had my jaw lowering like a forklift.
The "Cars" films somehow win me over despite my feeling at least three decades too old to invest in the travails of sentient automobiles. The first film was a surprisingly pretty, low-key love letter to friendship, Route 66 and lost Americana. The new movie -- which is pretty much the polar opposite of low-key -- takes the first film's dopiest character, Tow Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) and drops him into a retro spy adventure in which Michael Caine voices a secret-agent car loaded with cool gadgets.
This fish-out-of-water adventure (which features a surprising-for-Pixar number of jokes involving toilets) weaves in and out of Lightning McQueen's (Owen Wilson's) storyline, which involves him racing a snotty Italian racecar (John Turturro) in "Cars" versions of Tokyo, Italy and London.
"Cars 2" doesn't have the focus, comic sharpness or thematic depth of its predecessor. The first "Cars" is actually about something, and despite "Cars 2"'s nods to the importance of unconditional friendship and alternative fuels, the sequel really isn't about much more than director John Lasseter's professed love of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (Truth be told, I'm also not the biggest fan of Mater as a character, but again, I'm three decades too old.) But the movie's insanely generous level of detail still pushed it over for me -- from the precision of its action to its throwaway visual gags to its use of infamous "lemon" car designs as henchmen to its staggering cityscapes, which are designed at such a granular level that I felt like I could zoom in on any background window and find another automotive drama unfolding inside.
The film is preceded by a fun little "Toy Story" short built around Ken and Barbie, with Michael Keaton and the animators once again having a lot of fun with Ken's very metro lifestyle obsessions.
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(107 min., rated PG) Grade: B
'Cars 2' (The Oregonian, Friday, June 24, 2011)