If you’re excited about seeing Cars 2 (and your kid probably is, due to the extremely heavy marketing of the film on everything from food to insurance commercials), you might want to just wait it out and see this one on video. If you just need a way to pass a hot afternoon and want to do it in a theater, fine—just don’t get your hopes up. You might want to head to the bounce house or something instead.

The movie is pretty much irrelevant to the first film. Gone are the poignant messages about friendship, pride in hard work, and respecting other people (I mean cars); instead, there are a bunch of toilet humor jokes, a really thin, predictable plot that you figure out within a few minutes into the film, plenty of gratuitous violence, and, as with any other Pixar film, a complete downplay on female characters. In short, it was a big disappointment—especially for a Pixar movie.

This was a big shocker, to say the least. My daughter was really looking forward to the film, since she’d seen the first one and enjoyed it. I did, too, though there could have, as always, been more involved female roles in the movie. It was moving and special, particularly in the final moments when Lightning McQueen helps the old-time car though his last race, deeming that grace more important than his own eminent win.

This movie was a generic spy movie with a handful of funny parts. There wasn’t much laughter overall, though. There was plenty of violence, things blowing up, guns, and all kinds of other scary stuff that I’d prefer to make a film PG-13 more than nudity should. Two cars are dead within the first ten minutes of the film—one of them with parts of “him” floating around in the water above his dead body. If these characters had been humans—and they are meant to be human caricatures at the very least—it would have been a bloody mess, with limbs and eyeballs floating around like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Somehow this was okay in a kids’ movie?

As much as I’m continually disappointed with Pixar’s lack of strong female leads (sub-characters who don’t even interact with other females do not count), I’m usually geared up to be impressed by whatever they send out. (Indeed, the short before Cars 2, which was a Toy Story short, was awesome.) I have yet to see one that I absolutely didn’t like—or, I did, before I paid to watch this one just yesterday.

Sure, it was a matinee show, and we only spent fifteen bucks for the three of us (plus our free popcorn, since our theater is pretty darn awesome). My money would have been better spent on fireworks—something I hate buying, as you might as well just light your cash on fire. I think the biggest letdown was that it was from Pixar in the first place; they always set such a high standard—and even their sequels typically rock—that when they have a flop like this, it feels impossible, like something is askew in the universe. Hopefully when they churn out Monsters Inc. 2, it won’t be such a disappointment.