My Review of Cars 3 · 3:30am Dec 4th, 2021

Rating Scale:

12/10—a complete masterpiece; flawless and outstanding
11/10—Excellent, near-perfect film
10/10—the standard rating; awesome film with a couple of flaws
9/10—a wonderful film with several flaws
8/10–a great film with numerous flaws but not enough to ruin it
7/10—a fun and entertaining movie; not great but still enjoyable
6/10—a slightly above average film; it is something I might watch again
5/10—mediocre movie; not awful but not great either
4/10—a below average film; it could have been much better
3/10—a bad film; poorly written and poorly executed
2/10—a very bad movie; the few good things in the movie overshadowed by the bad things
1/10—a terrible movie; a total waste of time
0/10—a worthless piece of abomination; should have never been made

Greetings, everyone! This is Mr. J back with another movie review for our Disney Friday! This evening, I will be reviewing the third installment of Disney Pixar’s Cars trilogy: Cars 3. This is personally my favorite film of the trilogy; additionally, this movie is leagues better than the previous movie because it maintains the heart and soul of the franchise that we have seen in the first installment. Everything about it was so heartwarming, amazing, well-written, and sensical. It was pretty clear that Brain Lee, the director of this sequel, saw what was great about the first film, what went wrong in the second film, and tried to make something that would be a vast improvement over the latter. And that he did.

It makes me happy to see that none of the characters mention or even reference what happened in the previous film and only made explicit references to the first movie—particularly Doc Hudson as he was the central posthumous character for the plot.

With that said, I must say that the character development was solid for both Lightning McQueen and our new character: Cruz Ramirez. McQueen is now losing his touch as he has been racing for many years until a new group of rookies take over the race and beat all the old-time race cars. One of them is Jackson Storm (voiced by Armie Hammer), who has a deep hatred for McQueen. Once he beats him in a race, Storm forces McQueen to consider retirement. Unwilling to step down, Lightning must find a way to get back in the race and beat Storm once and for all.

The plot was very interesting because here we see an antagonist, who is a lot more manipulative and arrogant than the previous villains, trying to one-up our protagonist and attempting to prove himself as the fastest of them all. Then the latter ends up meeting a trainer who wanted to be a racer all her life and that trainer gets trained by McQueen to be the racer she always wanted. That was just wonderful writing in my opinion.

This shows us once again that if you want to make your dream a reality, you must never give up and keep working hard to make it happen. Never let anyone who doesn’t have your interests at heart tell you otherwise. Because of this, Cruz is one of my favorite characters in this series. Cristela Alonzo did a great job voicing her, and Owen Wilson was just as amazing as McQueen as he was before.

The animation is still amazing, the characters are entertaining, the humor is top-notch, the character chemistry is well-written, and the story is quite intriguing.

This is how a Cars sequel should be made. I have no idea what went through the minds of the directors that made the previous installment, but they clearly missed the mark. The first film and this movie make sense and maintain what this series is about. The second one means nothing and doesn’t exist... at least to me.

Overall, I enjoyed watching this film twice now. The first time I watched it was back a couple years ago which was through a YouTube movie reaction; just two nights ago, I rewatched the movie by myself to see if it was good as I remember. Boy, it felt good watching it again. Definitely now one of my favorite Pixar films of all time. This gets a 9/10! 🏁

Peace!