29. Cars 2

Talk about trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Cars 2 is an awkward mismatch of a movie that takes an already established, marketable franchise and drops a spy film into it, a genre Pixar probably would have been better off exploring in a brand new setting. The Cars world, in which vehicles are living, breathing people, is already a poor foundation for a spy story, which typically benefits from nimbleness of character and narrative, but to then put Mater, played by country-boy comic Larry the Cable Guy, at the center of it all makes the whole thing feel like a single joke stretched way beyond the point it stops being funny. In theory, this could have made Cars 2 work as a spoof of more serious spy films, injecting its least-likely hero into a story he’s categorically unfit for, but the film just doesn’t have the juice to meld these ideas together into a cohesive vision. When Cars 2 gets serious, it feels comical. When it’s trying to be funny, it hydroplanes into silly. Ultimately, it feels like a movie made to sell toy cars and little else. — Kenneth Shepard