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Apart from the “Toy Stories” franchise, Pixar hasn’t ordinarily opted for sequels to their fabulously successful animated features, so the company bigwigs must have seen something special in “Cars 2,” especially since the original wasn’t one of the company’s stronger efforts. But it’s difficult to imagine what it was. It makes you wonder whether John Lasseter, the studio honcho who also helped devise the story as well as directing, is losing his magic touch.

Certainly the picture is as technically impressive as one could wish—a colorful, visually virtuoso exercise that even 3-D can’t sabotage. But the final script by Ben Queen is misguided on a couple of counts.

First, while the shiny red vehicular “star” of the first episode, Owen Wilson’s speedy Lightning McQueen, is still around—now a champion racer—he’s been shunted off to the side. And while it’s true he was never a terribly interesting character, it was surely a mistake this time around to put the focus on Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy), the goofy, snaggle-toothed tow truck that became his buddy during the stay in Rustbucket Falls that taught him to be a good guy. “Cars 2” is a romance of sort, but more properly it’s a bromance between these two, with McQueen overcoming his embarrassment about taking his bumptious pal along to big races with his pit crew. And when he agrees to do so—inviting the truck to a series of European matches in which he’ll be pitted against his archrival, the preening Italian sportscar Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro)—it’s Mater who takes center stage. And frankly it’s one of those situations in which a character that serves well as comic relief becomes exhaustingly overused when thrust into the leading-man role.

The second misstep is the device employed to make Mater the star. He’s mistaken for an American spy, which turns the whole picture into a take-off on international Cold War thrillers of the sixties and seventies—a James Bond movie with a clunky rattletrap as the hero (who nonetheless figures everything out brilliantly in the end). It’s a tired idea, which brings in a slew of new characters, most notably British super-agents Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), who take over great swaths of the movie—and just aren’t very funny (Holley also gets sweet on Mater, which stretches things even further). This sort of spoof was old thirty years ago, and casting it with anthropomorphic autos doesn’t revive it anymore than doing it with cats and dogs did not so long ago.

The evil scheme Mater and his new friends eventually foil is also a by-the-numbers business. It seems that the races McQueen’s competing in are sponsored by Miles Axelrod (Eddie Izzard), who’s invented an alternate fuel that may replace gasoline, and a cabal of cars headed by The Professor (Thomas Kretschmann)—following the directives of a mysterious Boss—is out to destroy the threat to Big Oil by blowing up competitors that run on Axelrod’s formula. The one amusing element of this typically Green scenario is that the bad-guy cars are all models that failed with the public, leading them to seek revenge on the world for their ostracism (though it seems that older cars are conveniently ignored—is there an Edsel in there?). Otherwise, though, the entire thing seems old-hat, a heavy-handed bit of environmental posturing. And the revelation of the chief villain comes as no surprise.

“Cars 2” has incidental pleasures, of course. The backgrounds—in the American Southwest, in Tokyo, in Paris, in Italy, in London—are gorgeously rendered. The character animation is clever. There are some amusing verbal riffs and sight gags, like the appearance of “car” pope or British queen. And it’s always nice to hear Michael Caine’s voice, even when his lines aren’t the best.

But the tiresome dopiness of Mater pales over the long haul, and the spy shenanigans feel old before they even begin. As a sequel “Cars 2” is hardly a retread, but it goes off in the wrong direction—or rather directions. Especially coming from Pixar, this frantic but uninspired ’toon is a major disappointment.