The story in Cars 2 is all over the place and the car universe only makes the whole thing more abstract.
The story includes car races, terrorism, environmental issues, cold war agents, international stereotypes, hacking, secret world orders formed by victims of production malfunctions, the rejection of old friends and a whole lot of meaningless action and comedy skits.
And then someone decided to add the queen of England to sum this up as if she even had anything to do with the rest of the story.
It's brainstorm of references run wild. Even if you manage to follow along and get all the references, you gotta wonder why anyone wanted you to see this.
It's not awful, but it's still definitely the black sheep. It's tone is completely different and it also just feels like it's just the same characters (but kinda flanderisations of them too) rather than a natural progression of where the story should go next. The throughline between 1 and 3 is much more consistent, even more so if you skip 2.
2 isn't a bad film, but it's not a good sequel in my opinion, 3 however is a great sequel and a good ending point.
Yeah, I know it goes from "haha funny race" to "there's this terrorist here that's killing cars across the world" but guess what? I love that mission impossible shit
I actually agree with you that the hate is overblown. But in comparison to 1 and 3 it's definitely not as good. I wouldn't even say it's a bad movie, it's just kinda meh