Cars 2

Just occa­sion­al­ly a piece of ani­ma­tion will do some­thing that com­plete­ly blows your mind – Dick van Dyke leap­ing through the chalk draw­ing in Mary Pop­pins, The Bea­t­les rock­ing up in The Jun­gle Book, the ​‘cam­era’ pan­ning back at the end of A Bug’s Life, the wife dying in Up.

That the auto­mo­tive eyes in Cars 2 are wind­screens rather than head­lights pro­vides one such moment. Unfor­tu­nate­ly in this instance it’s one of gross dis­plea­sure. Any­one who has ever so much as looked at a car, even glanced at one in pass­ing, knows that a car’s face fea­tures head­lights for eyes, the grill for a nose and the num­ber plate for a mouth. It worked for Her­bie. What Pixar is doing trans­pos­ing two rov­ing, expres­sion­less dots on to the flat, fea­ture­less expanse of the wind­screen is anyone’s guess.

And that small but insur­mount­able detail speaks vol­umes about the giant inter­na­tion­al mess that is Cars 2. This isn’t a film – it’s a long, mean­der­ing sub-James Bond pas­tiche set in the con­found­ing world of talk­ing cars. There is even a British car that appears to have backed in from the set of The Avengers, leav­ing its script in the uni­sex toi­let of a Hap­py Eater on the way over.

Quite who Cars 2 is aimed at is anyone’s guess. The fact that we have to endure a good 10-minute descrip­tion of what a lemon sug­gests that the film­mak­ers have no faith in the car savvi­ness of their audi­ence. And yet this is a film all about cars – about For­mu­la 1, the Grand Prix and those fun­ny East­ern Euro­pean imports that break down all the time (you know the ones).

It’s too long to be a children’s film and yet too bum-numb­ing­ly dull to be any­thing else. It is a film that nods (expres­sion­less­ly thanks to those swirling wind­screens) towards ​’60s British spy thrillers and yet the main rela­tion­ship is lift­ed straight out of some hokey ​‘Sweet Home Alabama’-style Hol­ly­wood movie about a city boy and his hick buds back home.

The fact that it is being released in 3D is just anoth­er nail in the cof­fin. Or should we say span­ner in the gas­ket. Here’s hop­ing the Pixar wheels haven’t come off.