Cars 3: Third time's an automotive charm
A sly dig at inaccurate pollsters and lessons about male privilege leaves us pleasantly surprised

To date, the Cars franchise has produced characters that children respond to, and films they fidget through.
From the sequence’s inception, there has been a strange disjoin between the target teeny demographic and such heavily laboured, age-inappropriate messages as “slow down and smell the roses” and “it’s the journey not the destination”.
In this spirit, the newest instalment offers a stern warning to embrace, not reject decrepitude. Hey kids: Don’t Fear the Reaper.
There’s a strange inconsistency, too, between the hyperreality of the All-American landscapes and sleek, studied machines, and the cartoonish expressions on their windshields.
And then there’s Cars 2, a ghastly mess that saw Pixar indulgently squatting in the sandbox: What if Queen Elizabeth II was a car? What if Mater the Tow Truck, one of the most annoying characters in contemporary cinema, was a spy? For some reason.
Still, in 2011, just as the horrid Cars 2 became the first Pixar film to warrant a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, Disney/Pixar announced that the franchise had earned more than $8billion.
Damned right, we’re getting a third one.
The good news is that Pixar appear to have taken Cars 2 to the scrapyard. Cars 3, which picks up where the first, perfectly adequate, film left off, is by far the best instalment in the series. It even has a plot. Mater, happily, has been relegated back to the sidelines, while Kerry Washington’s data analyst provides a sly dig at inaccurate pollsters.
Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is increasingly overtaken by the next generation of high-tech cars, including the cocksure Jackson Storm (voiced by Armie Hammer). These younger whippersnappers are winning by availing of advanced training facilities and by playing the numbers: the Nascar equivalent of Moneyball.
Can they be beaten with old-fashioned gumption and a Rocky-style training montage? Possibly. But there’s a neat twist to Lightning’s latest odyssey. Enter Cruz Ramirez (voiced by the comedian Cristela Alonzo), Lightning’s new trainer and a wheeled, important lesson about male privilege.
The anti-Ghostbusters mob may not be happy, but everyone else should be pleasantly surprised.