In lieu of Cup-and-Ball-on-a-String: The Movie or The Magical World of Lite-Brite, we get Matchbox: The Movie (now on Apple TV), an adaptation of a classic toy-car line that has us all revved up to hear John Cena and Jessica Biel spout a little Brand History between action sequences. Extraction director and Russo Bros. acolyte Sam Hargrave helms this loud and silly slab of IP, which has us pondering whether it’s entertaining enough to overcome the theory that it was written by children on a playdate making it all up as they go along.
The Gist: Do not psychoanalyze this kid who wants to proclaim his love to a girl by giving her a rare Matchbox car – DID YOU KNOW the toys were designed to fit inside a Matchbox, hence the name? A true fact, shoehorned into this movie’s dialogue! – but loses his nerve, then grows up to be a kickass CIA superspy. We see adult Sean (Cena) truckin’ it, literally, away from some bad guys, with a nuclear bomb in the back. They stole it, he stole it back, committing some death-defying vehicular maneuvers that somehow didn’t detonate the delicate cargo. Hooray for him.
But then the death of an old friend finds Sean dropping his cover to attend the funeral in his tiny Nothinburg, Ohio hometown, where he reluctantly reconvenes with his childhood pals: Crosby (Sam Richardson) and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris), now married, token gay man Ted (Arturo Castro), and of course, The Girl Who Loves That One Matchbox Car That Was Lovingly Shot In Golden Hour Lighting, Aimee (Biel). It’s against superspy protocol, but c’mon U.S. Gov’t, have a heart, right? Then we learn why it’s protocol when a night of catch-up over booze finds the five friends drugged, black-bagged and trussed up in a plane flying over lord-knows-where. It seems they’ve been implicated in Sean’s nuclear-bomb bullshit. Sucks to be them!
As Sean promptly frees himself and wallops some heavily armed goons, the four normies all look at each other like, so THAT’S why Sean isn’t on Facebook! They’ll really have to summon some courage to be IRL friends with the guy and get out of this scrape, which involves a couple of CIA honchos (Corey Stoll, Danai Gurira) and a mysterious free agent (Golshifteh Farahani). Will Sean’s friends, people with regular-degular normal-ass jobs and lives, inevitably have to pilot helicopters, trucks, muscle cars, motorcycles and planes – all of which make for totes-awesome little toys to play with – down an endlessly unoccupied highway in order to save the entire world’s ass? No spoilers!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? It’s like Mission: Impossible meets The Fast and the Furious, but, you know, for the kids!
Performance Worth Watching: Why any director would ask Cena to go full grimfaced deadpan and not play to his naturally comedic strengths is ill-advised.
Our Take: The following exchange is emblematic of Matchbox: The Movie’s overall IQ: “You want to detonate a nuclear bomb in friendly territory to false-flag us into a full-scale war?” Sean exhorts, to which a villain replies, “It’s worked before.” OH, HAS IT NOW. All those nuclear bombs detonated in order to false-flag countries into full-scale war. So very truthy of you, o’ script written by a kid making it all up, etc. And I’m not happy to report that the movie gets progressively more dimbulbed from there, including, but not limited to, an “intelligence” agent being flummoxed by the intricate mechanism that is a carabiner. This person then dies. So it goes.
But is it at least amusing? Thrilling in all its action-packedness? Sort of. Perhaps in its failures, e.g., an inability to reckon with marrying kid-friendly IP and the adultish content of quaffing shots, sexual tension and deadly violence, bloodless as it may be. The dialogue is uniformly atrocious, the jokes are DOA, the Spy Shit is cliched and exhausting, the characters are wispy-thin and Hargrave mistakes duration for quality when constructing chases and fights, which feel like they go on and on for millennia.
His execution of said sequences is emblematic of the film as a whole, as they can be bracing in their practical effects – lots of real cars go crashity-boom – but also boast enough unconvincing cheapo CGI to take us out of the movie. As one throwaway one-liner goes, “Arnold made that seem so much easier!” Didn’t he now?
Our Call: Bottom line: Matchbox: The Movie might’ve been tolerably brainless escapism without all the shameless brand promotion. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
