Cars 3 Review: Pixar’s Most Thoughtful Racer Still Can’t Let Go

Pixar’s Cars 3 opens with its hero at the height of his powers and ends with him watching someone else take the checkered flag. That reversal is the engine of the film. Brian Fee directs a movie that wants to be about aging and the fear of being replaced. It gets closer to that idea than either of its predecessors, though it never commits to the darkness it keeps circling.

Trailer, via Pixar.

Lightning McQueen and the rookie Jackson Storm

The setup is clean. Lightning McQueen, a seven-time Piston Cup champion voiced by Owen Wilson, meets Jackson Storm, an arrogant rookie and the first of a generation of cars built with advanced technology to enhance performance. Storm is voiced by Armie Hammer. He wins through the season. Veterans retire or get replaced. At the final race in Los Angeles, McQueen briefly leads, gets overtaken by Storm and the other rookies, loses control, hits the wall and rolls over. Storm takes the Piston Cup. It is McQueen’s worst season on record.

That crash is the film’s best sequence because it is the one moment Cars 3 lets its hero actually lose. Pixar spent two films telling us McQueen is special. Here the movie takes that away in a single lap. The problem is what comes after.

Four months later, McQueen has recovered and decides to keep racing. He calls his sponsors, Rusty and Dusty, who tell him they have sold Rust-eze to a wealthy business car named Sterling, voiced by Nathan Fillion. Sterling sends McQueen to train at the Rust-eze Racing Center under Cruz Ramirez, voiced by Cristela Alonzo. McQueen cannot adapt to the modern methods. He damages a simulator by accident.

Sterling tries to force him into retirement. McQueen proposes a deal: if he wins the upcoming Florida 500, he decides whether to keep racing. If he loses, he retires immediately. Sterling accepts, on the condition that McQueen train with Cruz.

Cruz Ramirez and the training that goes sideways

Cruz is the film’s real subject, and Alonzo gives her the most life of anyone in the cast. She has a plan of her own, which the film takes its time revealing. Her training methods are unconventional and she has no real-world racing experience, which frustrates McQueen. They try to record his top speed at Fireball Beach. Then McQueen decides to train at Thunder Hollow.

Thunder Hollow turns out to be hosting a figure-8-style demolition derby called the “Crazy Eight.” McQueen and Cruz have to compete in disguise. Cruz wins. In the process she accidentally reveals McQueen to the public. He is angry, and the film treats that anger as a real fracture rather than a misunderstanding to be cleared up in a scene.

That Thunder Hollow detour is where Cars 3 briefly becomes a different, better movie. The demolition derby is loud, grimy and mean in a way the rest of the film is not. Lea DeLaria voices Miss Fritter, and the sequence has an edge the training scenes lack. Then it ends, and the film goes back to being about a champion who needs to believe in himself.

What the film does with Doc Hudson

The late Fabulous Hudson Hornet hangs over all of this. The film is explicit that McQueen draws strength from Doc’s legacy and risks everything on one last shot at glory. The production team researched NASCAR racers, particularly older ones, and a sports psychoanalyst, and focused on McQueen’s relationship with Doc Hudson and what it means. That research shows. The film understands that grief for a mentor is not a single scene but a thing that keeps returning.

Chris Cooper voices Smokey, a new figure in that lineage. He is the film’s attempt to give McQueen an elder who is still alive. Smokey works well enough, but he is a lesser echo of Doc, and the movie knows it.

The rest of the cast returns from earlier films. Larry the Cable Guy is Mater, Bonnie Hunt is Sally Carrera, Tony Shalhoub is Luigi. Kerry Washington voices Natalie Certain, a racing analyst. Bob Costas voices Bob Cutlass. Ray Magliozzi is Dusty. The film runs 102 minutes and carries the tagline “It’s not over until lightning strikes.”

Where Cars 3 ranks in the franchise

Here is the honest ordering, and it is not close:

1. Cars (2006) — the original, and still the only one with a real sense of place.
2. Cars 3 (2017) — the one that tries to say something about getting old.
3. Cars 2 (2011) — the one about spy cars.

Cars 3 is the second-best film in the franchise, which sounds like praise until you remember what it is beating. The gap between it and the original is wide. The original had a town with texture and history and a reason to exist. Cars 3 has a training center, a beach, a demolition derby and a speedway. Those are locations. They are not a world.

The film’s central problem is that it sets up a genuinely sad idea — that a champion can be made obsolete by technology he cannot match — and then resolves it with a race. McQueen’s answer to being replaced by faster cars is to be faster, or to let Cruz be faster for him. The movie never sits with the possibility that he might simply be done. It flinches.

The verdict on Cars 3

What Cars 3 gets right is its willingness to let McQueen be afraid. The crash in Los Angeles, the humiliation of the simulator, the moment Sterling tries to force him out — those scenes have weight. The film treats retirement as a kind of death, and for a character whose whole identity is the track, that is the correct instinct.

What it gets wrong is everything after the setup. The Florida 500 resolves a story about obsolescence with a story about one more win. Cruz’s arc is the more interesting one, and the film knows it, but it keeps handing the wheel back to McQueen. By the end, the movie has argued both that legends can be replaced and that they should not be, and it does not seem to notice the contradiction.

The animation is clean and the racing sequences move. The voice cast is deep and mostly wasted. Nathan Fillion’s Sterling is a thin corporate villain, and the film never gives him a real argument, which is a waste of the best idea in the script: that the person trying to end McQueen’s career might have a point.

Cars 3 is a movie about a legend learning to let go that cannot let go of its legend. It is the most thoughtful film in the franchise and still not a great one. The pieces of a better movie are all here, visible in the crash, in Cruz, in the shadow of Doc Hudson. The film just does not have the nerve to follow them to the end.

animation · Cars 3 · Lightning McQueen · movie review · Owen Wilson · Pixar