Cars 3 movie review & film summary (2017)
Champion race car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) has been on top for so long that he has failed to notice that he’s not getting any younger. He’s challenged by a snotty, bullying wannabe-champ, Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer), a super-high tech car that can go 200 m.p.h. without breaking a—well, cars don’t sweat, but you get the idea. Following a disastrous defeat by Storm, Lightning lets his sponsor Sterling (Nathan Fillion) talk him into training in an elaborate racing simulation facility under a younger trainer, Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), who excitedly but thoughtlessly describes him as “my senior project.” When Lighting wipes out there, too, Sterling informs him that he’s mainly interested in using a retired Lightning as a pitchman for Rust-eze mud flaps. This leads the former champ to return to his roots in the rural holler where his late mentor Doc Hudson (Paul Newman, playing “himself” via outtakes and a celebrity impersonator) learned skills and tricks that he passed down to Lightning. And it’s here that "Rocky IV" rears its meaty head, with a montage that contrasts Lightning and Cruz driving through woods and around dirt tracks against shots of Storm training in an indoor facility that looks like a place where a Bond villain might throw a Christmas party.
It’s not a spoiler to say that this film has a happy ending, but to its credit, for all its clichés, it doesn’t give us the ending we expect. The Doc-Lightning and Lightning-Cruz relationships suggest a passing of the torch, and “Cars 3” finds a decent way to give us that, along with a sub-theme of female empowerment and a sincere belief in the idea that privileges have to be given up or amended if society, even a car-centric one, is going to keep evolving.
The film hedges its bets here, though, as if it’s trying to avoid a boycott led by the sorts of men who buy tickets to women-only screenings of “Wonder Woman” and think they’re striking a blow for civil rights. And the notion of a gendered car universe that grapples with sexism is discombobulating because the film mostly dances around the issue without mustering the nerve or the chops to properly deal with it. (When Lightning repeatedly diminishes Cruz as “a trainer” rather than “a racer,” it sounds like he’s trying to put a female car in her place, and when Storm taunts Cruz, his insults evoke a male nerd taunting a female one for not being a "true" fan of the thing they both love.)
The notion of automotive gender and discrimination issues is not something the series ever tackled before; likewise the implication of a car caste system, where you're born into a particular automotive body and that defines the rest of your life, however long that is. Of course, this is a series in which cars can have baby cars, and there are car insects (or insect cars?), and in the second movie there are living planes, presumably to transport the cars long distances, inside of their bodies. And the tractors in these movies are coded as "cattle," which I guess are eaten by the other cars.
