Cars 2 May Drive You Nuts

Just because it’s Pixar doesn’t mean it’s good, as Cars 2 proves. Its worst offender: sidekick-turned-lead Mater, voiced by Larry the Cable Guy.

• “Maybe the company was tired of turning out one masterpiece after another and decided to coast for a while,” suggests AO Scott in the New York Times. The film “takes the bold, arguably generous, and ultimately calamitous step of pushing its lovable, goofy second banana to the center of the action.” Mater is the “redneck Jar-Jar Binks.”

• “I guess someone must like Mater, who’s already had his own spinoff TV show,” writes Stephen Whitty in the Star-Ledger. But “listening to him is like watching molasses dry.”
• Writing in the New York Post, Kyle Smith calls the film “dull, rote, and humorless.” “A lot of the bits don't even make sense,” he notes, “and some of them sound like they could have been written by the average 9-year-old in the audience.”
• But Kenneth Turan is more forgiving, arguing in the Los Angeles Times that the film benefits from “engaging characters, a plot that ensures energy, and such a wealth of auto references.”

(More Pixar stories.)