THIS is a G-Rated Movie?

Rating: 3/10 (15 July 2011)

Throughout the entire time I was watching CARS 2 in a theater crowded with VERY young children, I found myself wondering if maybe I'd just misremembered the actual MPAA rating for this movie. I was pretty sure that the theater marquee, the ticket-purchasing website, even the movie's own marketing materials all stated that this movie was rated "G", "Suitable for all audiences", by the MPAA. But the on-screen product was telling me something far different. Within the first 15 minutes of the movie, we see:
-- Cars ambushing a secret agent car (with the strong implication of a violent confrontation);
-- A warship turning guns on a fishing trawler, and;
-- A nail-biting car chase on an oceanic oil rig that wouldn't be out of place in a Bond or Bourne movie, complete with another spy car faking "death" after being shot at by a rocket launcher.
And, sadly, that's not even the WORST of what purports to be a "G"-rated family film dishes out for its unsuspecting audience of kids and their by-now-shocked parents. A MAJOR plot point of the movie involves the villain using an instability in an alternative fuel source to deliberately blow up race cars using that same fuel. Yes, you read that right: A movie that features anthropomorphic cars as its characters has several scenes of anthropomorphic cars turned into unsuspecting bombs by their fuel source. This is as inappropriate for a "G"-rated movie as it would be to have humans exploding because one of their food sources turns them into unsuspecting IEDs. This is not a movie for young children by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm not sure how a movie with this level of in-your-face explicit violence and mature content could possibly have gotten anything below PG-13.
Unfortunately, it's also not a movie likely to appeal to older children, teens, or adults. The storyline is convoluted, and even an adult friend who saw it commented on how tough it was to follow all the plot points. The message of the movie gets completely lost in all the espionage nonsense; if John Lasseter is trying to make some point about corporate machinations getting in the way of truly pursuing alternatives to fossil fuels, he needed to make it a lot clearer than turning race cars running on "Allinol" into bombs and tossing in a throwaway line near the end about how McQueen escapes the other race cars' fate. And speaking of McQueen, he and most of the Radiator Springs residents are either missing completely or simply reduced to extras needed to fill out a scene. If you're not a fan of Larry the Cable Guy or the Tow Mater character, you should just skip this movie entirely, because Mater is front-and-center as the lead in this disaster.
This isn't to say that CARS 2 is completely without watchability. The visuals are amazing at times, and the level of detail in some of the scenes serve as a reminder of why Pixar is the undisputed King of Animated Features. And the opening animated short featuring the Toy Story characters is simply brilliant. It's also, alas, the best thing about CARS 2, and it's over in less than 5 minutes.
CARS 2 is a huge disappointment as a movie, and the one good thing that could come out of it is a serious discussion about creating a rating that fills the gap between "Suitable for all Audiences" and "Parental Guidance Suggested".