About as much fun as blowing a tyre in the fast lane of a motorway.

Rating: 3/10 (21 August 2006)

Cars screeches off the starting grid with an action packed race sequence but loses control pretty quickly afterwards, ending up as a saccharine-sweet wreck of a film. I found Pixar's latest movie to be a charmless and rather dull effort, lacking the sharp humour evident in much of their earlier output.
Lightning McQueen is a cocky little race car looking to win his first major event, The Piston Cup, and, subsequently, receive a massive sponsorship deal. But en route to the finals, he becomes stranded in the small town of Radiator Springs, where he accidentally damages the main road. Sentenced to repair the damage he caused, Lightning spends the next few days fixing the road but, as he gets to know the lovable inhabitants of the sleepy town, he learns that there is much more to life than winning races.
Far too long, with a painfully slow second act, Cars needed a lot more laughs and a bit more action in order to succeed. With perhaps only a couple of decent jokes during its excruciatingly long 121 minute running time, this movie would have benefited from a major script overhaul, or alternatively, perhaps it would have been better off being scrapped entirely.