Review – Cars 3

Cars 3 brings us back into the world of hot-shot race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), still at the top of the racing world.  Early in the film, he gets into a horrific accident during one of his races trying to keep up with the newer, faster cars.  This accident puts McQueen on the disabled list and makes him contemplate his future.  Can he still compete?  Can he keep up with the new racers?  Should he retire?  McQueen decides to continue racing, but in order to do so, he gets help from some new friends and realizes he must go back to his roots and do things the old way.

A lot of this movie reminded me of Creed (2015), Ryan Coogler’s masterful installment of the Rocky franchise.  In Creed, Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) is incredibly talented and works out at the best facilities with great equipment, yet is brash and cocky, which hurts him in becoming a great boxer.  So what does he do?  He goes to Philadelphia to meet with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stalone), his father’s greatest opponent, and have him train him.  Rocky trains him the old school way, taking him to an old gym and doing exercises like chasing after a chicken and running along side a car.  This allows Adonis to take his natural talent, along with the fundamental skills Rocky has taught him, to fight at the highest level.

Similarly, that is the arc Lightning McQueen goes through in this movie.  McQueen is still incredibly talented, yet with the newer cars coming up, he can’t keep up on just pure speed.  He tries a fancy new training facility, but that doesn’t work for him.  He realizes that he must take the talent he has and adjust it accordingly and he does so by going back to the original race track his mentor Doc Hudson (R.I.P Paul Newman) learned all of his tricks.  McQueen meets with Hudson’s pit chief who shows him how Doc won all of his races against the hot shot racers back in his day.  It wasn’t speed, but smarts, knowing when to crash a gap and how to maneuver around the other cars, along with some unconventional training, like trying to survive a demolition derby with a possessed school bus.  The training allows McQueen to race with these hot shot cars and compete for the crown.

Is Cars 3 as good as Creed?  That isn’t really a fair comparison, but no, it isn’t.  But Cars 3 is the strongest of all the Cars films.  It takes a lot of the fun from the original and adds in a new element of drama and heightened emotion.  It isn’t going to make you ball your eyes out like Inside Out (2015), but you do feel for McQueen going through this journey and this realization that it may be time to hang it up.  We get a great mixture of classic characters like Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), Sally (Bonnie Hunt), and Luigi (Tony Shalhoub) and add in some fun new ones like Lightning’s trainer Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), the best new racer on the circuit Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer), and Doc’s old pit chief Smokey (Chris Cooper).  Everyone gets their moment to shine.  The races are slick and exciting, the jokes are funny for both kids and adults, and the themes resonate with everyone.

But what Cars 3 really represents is Pixar as a studio.  The original Cars follows the usual Pixar formula with great characters, good story, and themes of family, growth, and adapting to new things.  Pixar saw that the cinematic world was changing, as was their audience, and made Cars 2 completely different from anything they had done before to keep with the changing times, similar to how McQueen tries to train with fancy new machines because that’s what everyone else is doing.  But Pixar realized this new way didn’t work for them and went back to their roots, much like McQueen, and in both cases, the results paid off.

Did you see Cars 3?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.