Planes Review

Cars is one of those franchises that you either really love or you really hate however despite what you think about the quality of the films you can't deney how popular the franchise is. So popular infact that it actually spawned two spin off movies and no I won't be reviewing both of them because I have other plans however as you can tell by the title I will be reviewing one of them and so here is my review of the first Cars spin off film Planes.

The plot of the film is Dusty a crop duster with dreams of racing and one day he finally conjures up the courage to enter a race and now Dusty has to race dozens of planes around the world. I'm not going to lie this story is predictable as all hell you know where the story is going right from the moment Dusty does a time trial but in all fairness this a spin off movie from Cars so you kind of have to expect the story to be lacking.

Starring in the film is Dane Cook as Dusty Crophopper , Stacy Keach as Skipper Riley , Danny Mann as Sparky , making her hollywood debut is Priyanka Chopra as Ishani , Brad Garrett as Chug , Teri Hatcher as Dottie , Cedric the Entertainer as Leadbottom , Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Rochelle , Roger Craig Smith as Ripslinger , Gabriel Iglesias as Ned and Zed , Carlos Alazraqui as El Chupacabra and John Cleese as Bulldog.

Why does John Cleese like to do bad movies granted he's always the best part of those movies but still you have to wonder why an actor of his calibre is doing these bad movies. That said the acting in the film is fairly decent at best  but that's honestly the best I can say about the acting because for every good performance there's a bad one with perhaps the worst offender being Teri Hatcher who is so obviously phoning it in.

Now even tho Walt Disney Pictures and Disneytoon produced neither studio did the animation that honour went to Prana Studios and given that the last film I reviewed that they worked on was the dreadful Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return you'll be expecting me to say that the animation is bad. Well surprise surprise it's actually pretty decent this was going to be a straight to DVD film and the animation does indeed reflect that part of the production.

However given that the last film I reviewed was the awful Home On The Range I can very easily say that for something that was going to be straight to DVD this has some really good animation. I can very easily see why Disney chose to release this on the big screen because the animation does indeed look far better then most straight to DVD films but I feel that they should have given the team some time to make the animation reflect that instead of just keeping this highly impressive straight to DVD animation.

Like I said at the start of the review this is a spin off from the Cars franchise and incase you forget that the opening of the film straight up tells you it's a spin off because the opening image is a logo saying "World Of Cars" as if the character designs or the fact that the cars in the film look like how they do in that franchise would somehow make us forget that these films are set in the world. I get that this is a kids film but even little kids know when two films are set in the world especially when they have same character designs and so it makes that part of the opening pointless.

As a spin off the film doesn't really do that well because while there are characters that appear in both franchises there very minor characters at best with two of the main characters only appearing in the TV series Cars Toons and the character of Brent Mustangburger a commentator that I can guarantee no kid or adult for that matter remembers. It's wasted opportunity since little kids only remember the main characters so why not have Lightning appear and wish Dusty good luck just something like that would have worked.

Now given that this is a spin off of a PIXAR film you'd be forgiven if you thought that PIXAR was involved with the films production. Sadly there were not but former head of both PIXAR and Disney Animation and well known scum bag John Lasseter did come up with the story and he did executive produce the film so it does have that PIXAR feel to it but it's not PIXAR and so the film just comes of as PIXARlite.

The film is pretty much a Rocky movie the issue is the first Cars movie was also a Rocky movie except that movie did it better then this one. Which is in my opinion bad because the film makers went out of their way not to do anything that Cars did and would reject ideas if it was two close to something done in Cars however the film makers clearly forgot about the fact that both films is basically the first Rocky film.

This film is a comedy and so you'd expect there to be some jokes and while there are indeed jokes to be found ion this film alot of them just aren't funny. Which I guess does make sense because this film is meant for little little kids and so it would make sense that the jokes would indeed be funny only to that audience however it would have helped the film if it had one or two jokes that were funny only to an adult audience.

You know a film is bad when the opening song is a rock song about following your dreams because yeah that's a thing that happens in this film. The song is called "Nothing Can Stop Me Now" and is performed by Mark Holman the song itself isn't that bad but at the same time it also hits the message of the film right on the head thirty seconds in and so it would have been better saved if that was the end credits song rather then the opening song.

Overall this film is harmless but in terms of being a spin off and being a generally good movie that is where this film fails at least in my opinion. It also doesn't help that the film is very loosely connected and like I said it would have helped the film if they made that connection stronger by using the main characters from Cars instead of minor characters and so this film gets a 5 out of 10 from me and that's the best score I could give it.