Wheel-Spinning Exercise

Rating: 5/10 (27 April 2012)

Of the several Pixar movies I've seen, "Cars" was the only one that left me flat. It's not an unpleasant or stupid film, just a clear dip from an otherwise very high standard.
Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) is a rookie race car en route to contend for the all-important Piston Cup when a highway miscue leaves him stranded in a near-ghost town along desolate Route 66. McQueen is hot to move on, but the town's resident judge Doc Hudson (Paul Newman) won't let him until he fixes its main street. As the days to the Piston Cup dwindle, McQueen loses his temper but finds his soul.
"Cars" looks great, and there are some warm and funny digs at the world of NASCAR its fans will enjoy. The voice talent, including Pixar regulars Bonnie Hunt as love interest Sally the Porsche and John Ratzenberger as the truck who drives Lightning around, do their usual solid work breathing life into the characters. The visual design is hard to criticize; even the road textures and the chrome reflections appear perfect.
What's wrong with "Cars"? It doesn't really have any of the ingredients I expect from a Pixar film. It's not laugh-out-loud funny like "A Bug's Life" or "Monsters Inc.", it's not uplifting like Toy Stories 1 or 3, or wondrously engaging like "Finding Nemo." It's sort of like watching your little nephews playing with toy cars, diverting until you think about the scotch you could be drinking instead.
"Cars" is a movie for ten-year-old boys. As Paul Newman's last movie, it has that in common with his first film, "The Silver Chalice." Newman's film career nearly sank after "Chalice" while "Cars" would be his highest-grossing film. Too bad his presence made little difference to most of his audience.
Newman brings a cranky brio to Doc Hudson, the vintage sedan whose gruff exterior toward Lightning conceals a secret. You can hear a scratchy frailness in his voice, but there's a lot of game, too. Newman the car-racing buff even has two credits in the movie, the second as a "Special Racing Consultant." It's not Butch Cassidy, but Newman would have enjoyed going out on four wheels.
The big problems for "Cars" is that it's not that funny and way too long at two hours. Plot lines involving Lightning fixing the road or worrying about landing a big new sponsor play as dull as they sound. Prior Pixar films worked a lot of witty humor into their basic concepts. How could you not laugh with "A Bug's Life" when a mayfly at a sad flea circus whined "I got only 24 hours to live and I ain't wasting it here!" This time you get such wan efforts as a double entendre about the "gas" being served at the local cafe and Sally leaving behind "life in the fast lane" for small-town life. It's funny because she's a car, I guess.
The flash and glitz of cars on the go is all this movie ends up being about. No deeper riches await additional viewings. It's a pleasant timewaster from a studio capable of much more.