Cars movie review & film summary (2006)

Lightning's dream is to win the Piston Cup, the grand prix of American racing. He's on his way to the race when he gets lost, and then, more humiliating, impounded. Once released, he meets the population of Radiator Springs, led by Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), who may be an old-timer but probably knows something about Hudsons that Lightning doesn't: Because of their "step-down design," they had a lower center of gravity than the Big 3 models of its time and won stock car races by making tighter turns.

Other citizens include Mater (rhymes with tow-mater) the Tow Truck (voice of Larry the Cable Guy), Sally the sexy Porsche (Bonnie Hunt), Fillmore the hippie VW bug (George Carlin), and Sarge the veteran Jeep (Paul Dooley). Tractors serve as the cows of Radiator Springs, and even chew their cud, although what that cud consists of I'm not sure. Fan belts, maybe.

The message in "Cars" is simplicity itself: Life was better in the old days, when it revolved around small towns where everybody knew each other, and around small highways like Route 66, where you made new friends, sometimes even between Flagstaff and Winona. This older America has long been much-beloved by Hollywood, and apparently it survives in Radiator Springs as sort of a time capsule.

Doc Hudson, it turns out, was a famous race car in his day. That leads up to a race in which the vet and the kid face off, although how that race ends I would not dream of revealing. What I will reveal, with regret, is that the movie lacks a single Studebaker. The 1950s Studebakers are much beloved by all period movies, because they so clearly signal their period, from the classic Raymond Loewy-designed models to the Golden Hawk, which left Corvettes and T-Birds eating its dust. Maybe there's no Hawk in Radiator Springs because then Doc Hudson would lose his bragging rights.