Recently, I reviewed Zach Gregger’s “Resident Evil” and wrote about how, on paper, a new reboot of a 20-year-old movie franchise based on a 30-year-old video game series shouldn’t be remotely watchable. Yet, the film is fantastic, leading me to preach that all films deserve a fair shake, even the ones that sound like horrible ideas carved from the smooth brains of soulless studio suits looking to fleece a world hungry for comfort by drowning them in IP-adjacent slop.
I still stand by that sentiment, but I’m pretty sure it’s stuff like “Matchbox: The Movie” that we’re imagining when cynically picturing a studio mining old ideas for crispy new dollars. If we didn’t have genuine artists like Greta Gerwig transforming “Barbie” into a feminist fable or Lord & Miller‘s love letter to creation in “The Lego Movie,” or even Travis Knight improbably elevating the goofily delightful “He-Man,” the void of “Matchbox” is precisely what we would have received.
In all honesty, “Matchbox: The Movie” is a mildly entertaining, globe-trotting action-adventure anchored by a ridiculously charismatic cast and a few fun car chases, but the cynicism at the core of the film is hard to look past. If the film had been called anything other than “Matchbox,” people wouldn’t be sharpening their pitchforks.
Dating back to 1953, the original die-cast toys were just tiny vehicles for kids around the size of a matchbox. I was never a Matchbox kid myself, but I know my mom had tons and has fond memories of playing with them around the house as a child. Matchbox toys don’t have a storyline or any kind of lore, so watching the movie is similar to just watching a kid with ADHD sitting on the floor of your house and crashing a bunch of muscle cars, helicopters, motorcycles, Mac trucks and construction equipment into each other, flinging spittle around the room while they make all the sound effects.
The film stars John Cena as Sean Walker, a jacked spy framed for the theft of a nuclear bomb who accidentally pulls his middle school best friends into an adventure, taking them around the world as they fight rogue CIA agents, arms dealers and multiple eye-rolling puns.
When you stack a pretty awful script with a cast featuring the charming Cena, the underrated Jessica Biel, the national treasure Sam Richardson, the dryly hilarious Arturo Castro, an effortlessly watchable Teyonah Parris and the always magnetically mercurial Golshifteh Farahani, it’s pretty hard to hate the movie. But while “Matchbox: The Movie” is entertaining as an action/adventure buddy comedy, it plays like an advertisement in a way that “He-Man” and “Barbie” do not.
I would imagine all the screens in this world have pulled most kids away from Matchbox toys. The movie definitely feels like a desperate Mattel Toys throwing $100 million at a great cast, big action set pieces and a director who knows his way around explosions to remind people that they exist. Without taking the time to find not just a beating heart in between all the mayhem, but a point to it all (other than forgettable entertainment), then even kids won’t find something to connect with. At 126 minutes, the film is way too long to feel like a brief and entertaining diversion, especially for our collective, ever-shortening attention spans.
But what does a movie about a spy tasked with stopping bad guys from detonating a nuke have to do with “Matchbox?” I’m so glad you asked! Because in the opening scene, when we meet all our characters as middle school kids, they’re playing with Matchbox toys. The barely sketched romance revolves around a Matchbox car that young Cena wants to give to young Biel. That’s pretty much it.
I guarantee you, filmmaker Sam Hargrave (who made a kick-ass action movie in 2023 with Chris Hemsworth’s “Extraction 2,” proving he can make a pulse-pounding car chase) wanted the act of watching “Matchbox: The Movie” to feel like the act of playing with Matchbox: The Toys, but the undercooked visual effects don’t give the chases the same kind of tactile weight or kinetic excitement something like “Fury Road” has in abundance.
I would imagine that playing with Matchbox cars feels like a limitless road through your imagination, so it’s ultimately a little depressing that the movie feels less like play and more like watching a cousin play a video game you have no context for.
So yes, “Matchbox: The Movie” is exactly what you picture when imagining a soulless corporation taking an existing IP and wringing a few million bucks from it. What’s even more depressing than that is how well I’ve been trained as a child of the 1980s, hungry for that hit of dopamine that brings me back to the days before rent and heartbreak. When we get the eventual “Thundercats” or “Snorks” movies, I’ll probably be first in line. I just hope I’m at least a little excited instead of just feening for my next hit of childhood.
“Matchbox: The Movie”
Dir. Sam Hargrave
Grade: D+
Now Streaming on Apple TV+
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