‘Cars 3’ Races Into Spectacular Sequences With an Inspiring Message

Monet Clayton

“Cars 3” skews more toward the original flavor than the sequel and is a wild ride from start to finish. Like all Pixar movies, “Cars 3” is gorgeous — the landscapes the characters race through are more photorealistic than ever. Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) with his inimitable scratchy jocularity, is now past his prime — a celebrated stock-car racer who has been doing what he does for so long that he barely realizes the rest of the world has raced him by.

The movie poignantly captures the paradox of the high-tech era: that you become ancient simply by staying the same. There is, of course, a new kid on the block, a wide-bodied jet-black sports-mobile named Jackson Storm (voiced with unctuous palsy bravado by Armie Hammer), who casually hits rates of over 200 miles per hour with the use of state-of-the-art numbers-crunching technology. Trying to cruise ahead of this next-generation speed demon, Lightning is all bluff confidence, but really, he doesn’t have a chance. He wipes out, in a spectacular sequence of flipping velocity and crushed metal, and the damage he does to his lollipop shell is the least of it. What he needs to recover is his spirit.

He winds up going on another off-ramp ambling odyssey, though this one is organized by his sponsor: Sterling (Nathan Fillion), who has set up a glassed-in training facility complete with treadmills, wind tunnels, and the mother of all VR racing simulators. He assigns Lightning to a trainer, Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), who sees him as a fabulous relic. But after Lightning has a disastrous session on the simulator, and Sterling reveals that he basically wants to cash in on Lightning’s name to sell Rust-eze mud flaps, it’s time for our hero to get back in touch with his racing roots.

He burns rubber on the beach, and he and Cruz pay a visit, in cognito, to Thunder Hollow, a down-home mud slide of a track that turns out to be a demolition derby, ruled over by a drawling schoolbus with fire-spouting devil horns named Miss Fritter (Lea DeLaria). At this point, Lightning starts to seem like Pinocchio as a donkey-eared Lost Boy: He has fallen low, and the humiliation barely seems worth the price. There’s only one figure, it seems, who can save him: his old mentor, Doc Hudson, even though Doc has passed on. So he seeks out Doc’s grizzled old repair truck, Smokey (Chris Cooper), who shows him that retired racers never die — they just hang around in bars talking about the glory days.

“Cars 3” is very much a tale of mentorship, of learning how to give up your ego in order to bolster someone else’s. As such, it’s touching in a pleasingly formulaic, pass-the-torch way. It turns out to be a girl-power movie: Cruz Ramirez is a trainer because she never believed in herself as a racer, and it’s up to Lightning to set her straight.  Audiences should come out satisfied after seeing this beautifully uplifting and fun new Pixar flick.

“Cars 3” opens into theaters nationwide on June 16.