I saw the original in theaters, and that is the number one reason i saw this in theater…besides the reviews anyway.
Yeah, same here! I saw it twice in the theater, and one thing about this movie is that it’s a perfect cinema movie, it’s chalk full of action and explosions, perfect for the big screen.
“…but it’s with cars!!!” 
[spoil]I’m quoting John Lasseter, BTW.[/spoil]
Cars 2 is certainly a movie to watch in cinemas. I was even fortunate to watch it with my best friend, whom I’ll be leaving when I depart from Sydney this year, so it was kinda nice to be able to identify with Mater’s plight of having less time to spend with Lightning as he gets busier. Also, my buddy never watched the first one, and he’s a huge Japanese geek, so he thoroughly enjoyed this one (he said “it was awesome”) and I managed to put in a good word for him to see the first.
I have to agree with MissCarrera and Evangeline’s sentiments that it felt like a disjointed follow-up to the first. It was as if they wanted to do a fun spy movie and shoved the heart and emotion in as an afterthought. Which is nothing wrong, I guess, but when you compare it to the first one, which was more sentimental and personal to Lasseter, it feels kinda ‘off’. At least with Toy Story 2 and 3, or Kung Fu Panda 2, we see a more clear and consistent progression and expansion of the previous films’ themes. There’s some semblance of that in Mater and Lightning’s friendship and how it is put to the test, as well as how Mater now gets to be the ‘fish out of water’, but again, it just doesn’t gel with me for some reason.
That said, though, I thoroughly loved it on a personal level, because it ticked all the right boxes for me to become a bona-fide spy thriller. But it just missed the extra ‘spark’ that would elevate it to Goldfinger or Casino Royale unforgettable-ness.