Cars 2 is a very fun movie. The first movie centered around Lightning McQueen, but the second movie focuses more on Mater, his tow truck best friend. Lightning McQueen is at the top of his game winning races, and when oil magnate Axelrod sponsors a World Grand Prix to promote his new alternative fuel Allinol, Mater calls in to get Lightning to join the races. Lightning takes his pit crew and his best friend Mater from Radiator Springs on the world tour, but is embarrassed because Mater’s boisterous, country bumpkin nature means he doesn’t fit in a cosmopolitan and professional environment; he enjoys himself in Japan but doesn’t fully understand their culture or how to behave there. Meanwhile, secret agent Finn McMissile is coincidentally at the same venue hoping to make contact with an American agent whose cover is compromised, so he discreetly attaches his intel to unsuspecting Mater. McMissile and his support Holly Shiftwell confuse Mater for the captured American agent, noting that he is very “American”. His cover as a carefree country bumpkin covered in rust is flawless, and while Mater behaves foolishly he is also kind, well-meaning and loves to be able to help people. He also possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of cars relating to his profession as a tow truck that not only impresses McMissile and Shiftwell but actually comes in handy when examining evidence, further convincing them that Mater really is a talented secret agent and not an ordinary tow truck being dragged on a wild adventure that takes him to several exotic and beautiful locales in the world of Cars.

While Mater is on his secret mission, Lightning McQueen has his own personal challenges. Misunderstandings with Mater causes Lightning to have an argument and he asks Mater to leave and go back home where he belongs. Lightning later feels bad about what he said and is advised that if Mater really is his best friend, he should accept his friend for who he is and make up. On the opposite side, Mater finds out how people really see him when McMissile compliments him on how brilliant he is at acting like a fool, and feels ashamed at how embarrassingly he’s been behaving. Mater’s mission incidentally intersects with Lightning’s races so when they meet again in Italy and England, more clever and hilarious obstacles make it difficult for Lightning to make up with Mater while Mater tries to warn Lightning that he’s in danger. There are other themes in the movie about friendship as Mater values every dent he has and refuses to get them buffed out because they represent memories he’s made with his best friend.

While Lightning McQueen is racing, he has a rival in a flashy Italian racecar who deliberately provokes and insults him, and Lightning, being a better person in this movie than he was in the last one, does his best to ignore the insults and focus on doing his best in the race. Meanwhile, Mater discovers that the villains responsible for the crimes he’s investigating are all “lemons”, makes and models that were discontinued and mocked because they broke down so often. He tells the lemon cars that while it’s not fun to break down all the time or be mocked for it, becoming powerful and rich isn’t going to make them feel better. His moral doesn’t take with the villains he’s lecturing.

Of course, the main premise involves oil magnate Axelrod allegedly developing an alternative fuel Allinol and sponsoring the World Grand Prix to ostensibly promote the fuel, but secretly plots to discredit it by proving it to be too dangerous to run on so everyone will buy more gasoline from him. Unfortunately, that’s a major woke offense and I’m sorry I have to ding the movie for it.

For several decades, fossil fuels had been unfairly vilified. It was either because they were considered “unrenewable”; they were finite and people were worried we were going to run out of them in the near future, or because they were considered a major source of emission pollution. [“Fossil fuels are made from dead dinosaurs, and we know what happened to them”, as Axelrod says, is not a persuasive argument based in facts or evidence]. Alternative energy sources were often depicted in cartoons as cheap, abundant and having no downside, making them the logical choice and making anyone who stuck with using fossil fuels look like a dinosaur in comparison. However, the villains in this movie didn’t need to craft an elaborate evil plot to discredit alternative energy because here in the future alternative energy discredited itself by proving not to be as perfect and drawback-free as promised. I’m not the expert on this, but I do know that the type of fuel that a car can use is dependent on the type of engine it has. I’ve been told that fuels with ethanol-based mixtures can corrode or damage engines on older cars and that they don’t provide as good gas mileage as regular gasoline, and the jury is out on whether ethanol-based gas mixtures have lower emissions than regular gas. There is such a thing as biodiesel, where the engine runs on recycled grease from the deep fryers in fast food places, but I think in order to use that as fuel you’ll need a diesel engine to begin with. Also, Axelrod claimed to have converted from a gas car to an electric car, which to my knowledge doesn’t take any fuel at all, alternative or otherwise. However, electric cars have proven to have many drawbacks as they are heavier than normal cars, they don’t always work in cold weather, their batteries are prone to exploding and difficult to recycle, and while solar energy collection is both intermittent and inefficient, many electric car charging stations get their electricity from coal-fired power plants that use fossil fuel anyway. But I’ve been told that Mater is right in that EV engines don’t require oil for lubrication the same way internal combustion engines do. Considering that Axelrod’s engine is known to be faulty, he might have been better off if he actually did convert, if that were indeed possible for his make and model. [If you’re an automotive or energy expert, feel free to chime in and enlighten me on this]. I’d personally prefer to shrug off remarks against “Big Oil” as cartoonish supervillainy rather than an accusation against real-life oil companies.

As for whether “organic” things are superior quality: I’ve been told that for cars synthetic lubricants work better, but for human beings I would say that it’s better to eat real food and limit the consumption of junk foods.

Some parental guidance:

While posing as a waiter, Mater slurps up Lightning’s drink from a straw, gets disgusted, and spits it all back into the glass. He later serves the drink and defensively lies to Lightning, saying “I didn’t taste it!”

Scatalogical humor apparently isn’t so vulgar when vehicles are the rear bumper of the joke. Mater and Lightning tip over a massive Earthmover, and after being tipped the Earthmover expels exhaust right at them.

There is a scene where Mater is in a restroom using a high-tech Japanese toilet that operates like a car wash, and a bidet shoots out to rinse his undercarriage. Holly Shiftwell is asked to meet up with her contact there but objects because she can’t go into a men’s restroom. When Mater leaves the restroom he emits exhaust loudly and blames the “pistachio ice cream” [spicy wasabi] he ate earlier.

During the chase scene at the airstrip, a bad guy car drives through an airplane and lands into a waste collection tank.