Cars 3 Review

McQueen’s back. After the slightly bizarre and unusually shooty Cars 2, this latest Pixar release goes back to focus on racing again, with McQueen starting to struggle against the latest up and coming racers in the Piston Cup. With a 4 year old son I’ve watched the first two Cars films somewhere in the region of 800 times (ish) so headed to the cinema to give this a go – a film he’s been excited about for nearly a year.

On the whole it was a very enjoyable film, although it’s worth noting out there’s a good chunk of backstory about Doc Hudson (with some awesome previously unheard voice snippets from Paul Newman who died while Cars 2 was being made) which I found really interesting and added to the depth of the story, but my son was starting to get a little bored in the build up to the final big race. It’s a fairly long film, and we were pretty lucky to have missed the trailers by arriving late.

But the new characters are pretty likeable, with the latest Dinoco racer getting some very funny treatment and Cruz Ramirez – McQueen’s new trainer – getting some pretty cool stuff to be getting on with as well. The Lightning/Cruz relationship isn’t quite as endearing as the Lightning/Sally story from the first film, but as the film reaches it’s closing stages it’s easy to see the role that Lightning starts to play, and why there’s a big Doc backstory needed.

But by the end my boy was jumping up and down with excitement, and came out grinning as we left. This is FAR better than Cars 2, with some excellent racing scenes, a surprisingly satisfying ending and an awesome demolition derby to look forward to. If you’ve got kids who liked the other films then this is a no brainer.