A Cars 3 Review

For those of you eagerly asking yourselves if you should see Cars 3 let me tell you it’s not worth it. Somehow this movie failed to be everything it was trying to be and I’ll tell you why. We start with good old Lightning McQueen in his prime, winning race after race, and having friendly rivalries with his racing buds. When suddenly a millennial- I mean Jackson Storm shows up with his high tech training methods and leaves the older cars in the dust. Soon Lightning McQueen and his peers are being replaced by more of these rookies until Lightning McQueen is the last of the oldies. During one race McQueen loses his focus and has a terrible crash. Then we time jump four months and he’s hiding out in Radiator Springs completely devoid of his will to fight. However all of his friends convince him to get back out there and his old managers tell him they have a new state of the art training facility to get him into racing shape. At the facility he meets his trainer, Cruz Ramirez, another young car whose training methods he thinks are a waste of time. Eager to prove that he is good enough to race with the likes of Storm, McQueen gets on the training simulator and breaks it making his investor decide that it would be best if McQueen retired before he damages his reputation. However McQueen strikes a deal that if he wins the next race then he is able to choose when he retires. Thus begins the journey of Cruz and McQueen and they try to make him a faster than Jackson Storm. Together they leave the facility because McQueen insists that he  needs to train the old fashioned way, and head for an old racing track that McQueen’s mentor, Doc, used to race on. Oh and I forgot to mention but apparently Doc passed away before the first and second movie. Instead of a race track the two find themselves apart of a demolition derby, shenanigans ensue, and Cruz ends up winning it. After the derby McQueen and Cruz get into a fight where Cruz says that she always wanted to be a racer but she wasn’t (her model) a racing car and when she got her chance she didn’t take it because she didn’t think she could do it. Next the two travel to Doc’s home town where they meet a bunch of older racing cars and even Doc’s old mentor. Doc’s mentor begins training McQueen by racing him against Cruz, but he is never able to beat her so off they go the main race we’ve been building up too. At the race McQueen isn’t doing so so well when he finally realizes that Cruz is the answer to beating Storm. So, halfway through the race McQueen goes to the pit stop and tells the others to paint his number on Cruz and they send her out to finish the race with McQueen taking on the role of her coach. She wins the race using a trick she learned while on the road with McQueen and the win is counted as win for both of them meaning McQueen won the deal he made. Now at the end McQueen is Cruz’s coach and they do a big reveal where McQueen appears sporting Doc’s old colors.

Okay now time to get to the meat of things. I feel like this movie was trying to be touching and make it feel as if McQueen had come full circle in the series from rookie to coach. However it ran into issues because the relationship between Doc and McQueen wasn’t even mentioned in the second movie. I swear Doc’s death wasn’t even mentioned in Cars 2 or if it was it carried no emotional weight at the time. This made McQueen’s sudden reverence of Doc come as a complete surprise and it felt forced. They also paired any mention of Doc with flashbacks from the first movie as it to say “hey, remember Doc and how much McQueen cared about him”? They don’t even tell you how he died which makes you wonder, how can cars die? My other issue is that although this movie was likely targeted at children the main character is an aging car afraid of becoming irrelevant in the new and shifting world he inhabits. A lot of the humor panders to the idea that the old ways are somehow better, like comics that make jokes about kids these days not knowing what books are. Even the young car, Cruz, that the younger audiences are supposed to relate to doesn’t know much out of her generation and continually refers to McQueen as old (not in a joking playful manner either) even though he can’t be more than ten or fifteen years older. She often comes across as annoying and I found her somewhat dislikeable as a character. Maybe I would have enjoyed this movie more if I was also someone afraid of being replaced by the youth.

Another issue I had was the pure fact that problems in our world don’t translate into the world of cars. For example Cruz is stated to be a “Hispanic female” (whatever race means in the world of Cars) and her story is meant to reflect how some people are born into privilege and others are not. Essentially McQueen being a racecar is a white male and Cruz who isn’t a race car is a female poc. However, Cruz would wake up early to train so that she could become a racecar, even though her model wasn’t what people generally thought of for the job. This is an important topic and Disney’s Zootopia did an excellent job of dealing with issues of race, bias, class, and privilege. The world of Cars, however, isn’t really built for this kind of thing. There is a bit in the second movie about old cars being cast aside but other than that no real class system exists. Do cars have a form of currency? There is talk of wealth and selling things, but I’ve never heard of cars spending money or being poor.  Another issue they bring up is sexism in the racing world. From the previous Cars movies it can be observed that lady cars don’t race since all the other racers are coded as male and voiced by male actors. In Cars 3 though we meet and old female car who used to race in Doc’s day. She mentions that when she started racing that everyone said the track was no place for a woman. I get what Pixar is trying to do they are trying to address the lack of women in male dominated fields and I guess this movie is supposed to encourage little girls that they can do whatever boys can. However, in the world of Cars it just raises questions. Is Cars a sexist society? What are the differences between male and female cars? Are gender roles and a thing and what are they? My last issue is with the ending where Lightning McQueen and Cruz switch mid race. How is this a legal thing in the world of professional racing? The only rule that they needed to abide by was Cruz needed to wear McQueen’s number. This raises more questions about the Cars universe, like why don’t all the teams adopt this method and instead of working hard to change tires really fast in the pit switch out between two cars. It seems like you could save time that way and save your racers from mental exhaustion. The fact that this is legal also makes it canon that the cars do not feel exhaustion, which is weird since they’ve definitely been out of breath before.

If you made it this long through my Cars review you’re amazing. As a movie it lacked presence and the pacing was poor. The resolution was disappointing and also confusing. All in all this movie is fine if you’re five or don’t care if the world makes sense. Otherwise I would suggest you watch something else and just forget about the world of Cars completely. Why we even needed a third Cars movie is beyond me, but if you ever want to talk to me about the world of Cars feel free because I still have many questions.

11 Replies to “A Cars 3 Review”

  1. Nice review, Mari! I enjoyed reading it. While I agree with most of your issues with the film, I personally enjoyed it a bit more than I believe you did. I didn’t really get the “those darned millennials” vibe you got, so much as a general aging athlete story, which may have been part of it. I can, however see where you’re coming from. Also, I rather appreciated the effort to include Doc in the story. It felt like, in that regard, the movie was trying to be a real sequel to Cars, unlike the utter fiasco that was Cars 2. But the pacing was odd and the subtext about Cruz struck me as strange as well.

  2. Fun review Mari. I’ve only seen the first Cars movie and honestly I can barely remember the plot of it, but between that and this Cars 3 rant, (along with the ones you seem to drag people into daily) it’s fairly clear that nothing in this universe seems to make sense. I feel like the Cars universe was most likely created for merchandizing, “kids like cars! We’ll make a movie about cars to sell more cars!” And because it was intended for children they didn’t feel the need to figure out what was going on and have any of it make sense.

  3. Can always expect a lot of questions when it comes to the Cars universe and clearly this movie did not seem like an exception. I’ll admit none of this came as much of a surprise and I still wonder why they even seriously decided to pitch a 3rd movie. Regardless, this was nice because now I know what happens and never have to stress about “gee, I wonder what Cars 3 is like.”

  4. Good review Mari. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but even though there are more things to question about the Cars universe, I do like to the idea of the trilogy for McQueen from rookie to coach. However, the individual pacing of each Cars movie wasn’t entirely setup to tell this kind of story. From your review, it sounded like that they threw this idea together after seeing that they could possibly make a lot of money. While Cars 2 is notoriously known by many as the start of Pixar’s downfall, they still made a lot of money with that movie. It didn’t surprise me that they made a new one, but it is surprising to see them trying to close up an McQueen’s entire character arc that has elements that were nearly non-existent from the previous films.

  5. I forgot this came out. I’ve heard similar sentiments about Pixar’s fear of the millennial in this film. I have not seen Cars 3, but I think any comedy that can be dripped out of “millennial-fear” dried up years ago. Aka I agree with your sentiments. Maybe now is the time for me to admit that I haven’t seen Cars 2 either, but I feel like I wouldn’t enjoy either of the sequels. Aka, your review was very informative and I loved it!

  6. Mari,
    really liked the review. I had not been planning to see the movie but hearing that it failed so miserably is still unsettling. I agree that Zootopia did well speaking about race and have often wondered why more movies did not do this same type of social commentary. However, I never noted that some worlds do not lend themselves to speaking about such issues and think that it was interesting to see that it can be worse to half way speak about issues than to actually tackle it well.
    Nicely done!

  7. God. I love the cars universe, it’s such a hot mess. I love how nothing in the cars universe makes any sense in its own universe. Why do old cars exist? WHo KNOWS. Why cant cars just replace their parts to remain relevent? WHo CARES! Good to know that Cars tries and fails miserably at being meaningful and trying to bring up issues of privilege. I can’t wait for the inevitable Cars 4

  8. Wow, this was insightful. I haven’t had the chance to see Cars 3, and had no plans to before I read this. Now I’m even less enthused. I figure the purpose of the movie was more of a money-grab than a saga conclusion. Personally, based on the previews and the premise, this would have been the better movie to have as a sequel. At least then the plot points would have context (especially the instances with Doc’s death).

  9. The thought of sexism and racism within the cars universe is both hilarious and quite disturbing. I agree that it’s supposed to be reflective of our world, but in a world where you can just change your paint color it doesn’t really feel right. Does this mean there were car genocides? Wars? We may never know until they decided to make an even grittier reboot of the franchise.

  10. I’m definitely in the minority with this comment, because I actually still enjoy watching the original Cars movie. I definitely won’t argue that the movie was nearly as good as Pixar’s others, but the movie had a sort of old American charm to it that was nostalgic and fun to watch, especially for someone like me who’s into road trips along Route 66. Cars 2 completely lost all sense of emotional investment, and I could tell that Cars 3 was trying to bring back the feel of the first, but I think at that point it was way too late to try and salvage it. Oh well. At least we also got a good Pixar movie this year with Coco.

  11. I definitely agree with the sexism problem in the car’s world Pixar build up. I did noticed that only male cars were racing in Cars1 and Cars2. It is so obvious that the female coded characters were only on the side of story and cheering for the male race cars….

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