Planes Reviews
Top CriticAn endearing enough David-and-Goliath tale, aimed squarely at younger kids.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A visually colorful but otherwise vanilla continuation of the series.
Strictly by the numbers, from the believe-in-yourself moral to the purely predictable ending.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Has the look and feel of Pixar's 2006 hit, "Cars," if not the latter's charm or strong story.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Planes" is for the most part content to imitate rather than innovate, presumably hoping to reap a respectable fraction of the box office numbers of "Cars" and "Cars 2," which together made hundreds of millions of dollars.
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| Original Score: 2/5
As with "Cars," the world of "Planes" feels safe. A little too safe, perhaps.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
It's engaging enough, driving home the familiar message of following one's dreams and the less hackneyed theme of facing one's fears. But it feels far too familiar
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| Original Score: 2/4
While the plotting is rather pedestrian, the humour mostly lame, what makes Planes a stand-out experience - not surprisingly, based on Disney's vast and impressive history of animated classics - is the visuals.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A charmingly modest low-budget spin-off from Pixar's "Cars'' that provides more thrills and laughs for young children and their parents than many of its more elaborate brethren.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If "Planes" were a reasonably priced download, you'd gladly use it to sedate your kids during a long car ride. As a theatrical, 3-D release, however, "Planes" will sedate you, too.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
This film is 100 percent devoid of surprises. It's the story of an underestimated underdog that's like every other kid-friendly, life-coachy story about an underestimated underdog.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Has all the hallmarks of a straight-to-DVD project - inferior plot, dull writing, cheap drawing - perhaps because it was intended for the bargain bin at Target, Walmart, and Costco.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Seems ... like a lesser version of what may be Pixar's two weakest efforts, the "Cars" movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Planes" was originally scheduled to be released straight to video. Although the smallest children might like bits and pieces of it, there's nothing in the movie that suggests why Disney strayed from its original plan.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Many will enter theaters thinking this is a Pixar film, with the raised expectations that accompany that mistake. But even cynical animation fans will see there's quality here. After a little turbulence, "Planes" comes in for a nice landing.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Cars," with planes. And some cars. And a truck or two.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The jokes in "Planes" are runway flat, and parents will likely reach for the air-sickness bag.
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| Original Score: 1/5
Despite the more aerodynamic setting, this Cars 3D offshoot emerges as an uninspired retread.
"Planes" borrows a world from "Cars," but even compared to that soulless exercise in well-merchandised animated automotive adventure, "Planes" is dead in its big, googly eyes and hollow inside.
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| Original Score: 1/5
Strangest is the film's tendency toward racial stereotyping, which comes off as breezily silly at best and downright insensitive at worst (Cedric the Entertainer voices a Southern-accented laze-about biplane named Leadbottom).
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Allegedly next on the assembly line: Trains and Boats. All aboard? Do we have a choice?
"Planes" is so overrun with broad cultural stereotypes that it should come with free ethnic-sensitivity training for especially impressionable kids.
As shameless an attempt by Disney to sell more bedspreads to the under-10s as Planes is, it nonetheless manages to be a minor lark that will at least mildly amuse anyone who ever thrust their arms outward and pretended to soar over the landscape.
