Still a fun Pixar effort, but the weakest of the Toy Story films.

Rating: 7/10 (20 July 2010)

I know, I know... I'm sure I'm going to get destroyed over this review. Anything under eight stars for a Pixar movie is blasphemy! While I thought TS3 was an entertaining two hours... it just wasn't quite up to par with the first two entries from the trilogy.
The opening and ending dealing with Andy growing up and the toys outliving their usefulness to their owner was well done Pixar heartstring tugging... no complaints there. The middle act, which boiled down to a prison break movie, was a bit dull despite all the Pixar eye-candy trying to convince me otherwise. There were some gags to be had, a funny turn by Potato Head needing to use real vegetables, some thin and obvious (but still humorous) banter between Barbie and Ken and the now required shtick of Buzz Lightyear getting reset to various memory-wiped settings... but in general the middle 60 minutes of the film just seemed oddly disconnected from the rest. The end result was an odd sandwich effect, with the bread on either end actually being much more enjoyable then the meat in the middle.
While I'm certainly not trying to slag the movie, I don't think 7/10 is anything approaching a hatchet job, I found this one to be clearly a level below the two films that preceded it. Pixar didn't waste the magic they built up with TS1 / TS2... but they certainly didn't expand on it either.