Someone asked, “What if Fast & Furious put eyelashes on it’s headlights?”
Matchbox: The Movie is the answer.
Matchbox holds the kind of flimsy premise that makes you wonder if Hollywood has finally driven straight off a cliff. This is apocalypse-eve entertainment, the sort of corporate filmmaking that makes you question whether anyone involved has ever actually enjoyed a movie, let alone played with a toy car.
Matchbox: the Movie feels like someone fed Red One into an AI chatbot and typed, “Do this, only make it Matchbox cars instead of Santa.”
The opening prologue introduces it’s core team of drivers as middle schoolers who all belong to a special Matchbox toy car club, where they build tiny city scapes to play-drive their little vehicles around in makeshift adventures. It immediately had me scrunching my brow in bewilderment.
In what world are a bunch of eighth graders playing with Matchbox cars? Who exactly is this movie made for? Six-year-old boys? Not that girls don’t play with Matchbox cars. I just don’t think the majority of them want to watch a movie about it, even if they do collect the little metal pocket fidgets.
This movie is not made for kids. It’s not made for adults, either. It’s landing somewhere around 13 year old chudbilly who thinks they might want to grow up to be a Juggalo. The big, expensive Hollywood budget somehow making the whole thing feel even cheaper.
I don’t consider myself a cinephile. I’m too much of a dim bulb for that. I’m what film snobs refer to as a movie junky. The type who’ll snort any bad batch of dust-laced baby powder off the bathroom floor in a truck stop bathroom.
This thing here is the kind of bad smack that snorts into the brain like a choke on milk that’s gone down the wrong wind pipe. A head lift and stumble that causes your entire life to flash before your eyes. It’ll have you rethinking all of your choices, making you wonder how you wound up on the edge of such a smelly sewer grate. It’ll have you rethinking your entire relationship with movies.
Oh, it still gets you high. But at what cost? As you furiously rub your nose to get it off, yet catch yourself laughing at the poor man hanging out the back of an ambulance with his leg on fire.
If HDTGM doesn’t do an episode on this soon, I’m gonna fire Paul and demand a coup.
Guys?
There is a split diopter shot in Matchbox: the Movie. And a “Oner”. All the nerdy little cinema slang terms that dorks throw around at that hipster birthday pizza party to impress their film illiterate friends, hoping to make themselves feel cool, are utilized in a gosh darn Matchbox cars movie.
Think about that.
Maybe now you’ll join me in just shutting up and enjoying the pizza while that other dude in the River’s Edge T-shirt tries to front and act all cool with his dardy lingo, like he’s the only one in the room who’s watched The Studio.
Did you ever look at an actor and think, “That guy must serve the best snacks at the devil party?” Like, seriously, why else is he getting jobs in movies? I’m not gonna name names, but I’m not talking about John Cena, or Sam Richardson, or especially Teyonah Parris. She deserves the world, and the world keeps giving her horrible things to play with, like this.
There must have been a way to make a Matchbox car movie that made sense. Right? Why not shrink people down and have them driving tiny cars around a giant world, like Toy Story with a little more horsepower? There are huge stretches of this used ashtray that don’t even have cars in them.
That should be against the laws of a Matchbox cars movie.
Look at Barbie. People wondered how anyone could turn a plastic doll into a movie that worked for adults. Then Greta Gerwig came along and made something clever. It was genuinely interested in what the toy represented. The movie understood its assignment. It was about Barbie first and foremost.
Matchbox doesn’t have that kind of purpose. Sure, there are a bunch of older kids playing with Matchbox toys, but the movie itself isn’t really about the toys at all. It’s a muscle-bound action hero chasing a nuclear warhead, with some car chases thrown in for good measure. You could slap a different logo on the whole thing and barely anything would change.
The hero’s group of friends is a sorry bunch, too. I understand that Jessica Biel has bills to pay, but Hollywood, you could do this woman better.
And the jokes? A couple actually work. That’s what makes the whole thing so frustrating. Every once in a while, a funny moment slips through the wreckage, like somebody on the production team realized the movie was belly-flopping into an empty swimming pool and decided to throw us a bone just to wink and nod, hoping to create some “so bad it’s good” energy. That never works on purpose.
Sam Richardson is one of the few genuinely entertaining things about this entire tire fire. His ambulance scene got a smile out of me, and it reminded me of Mother, Jugs & Speed, the kind of scruffy, chaotic comedy that knows exactly what sort of ridiculous world it’s inhabiting.
Richardson seems to understand the assignment, even when the movie around him appears to have misplaced it. But why in the world would you ever name your one black leading man Crosby, of ALL the names to choose from. Things move fast, there are a lot of loud noises. The old geezers sitting on the couch are gonna ask, “Are they calling him Cosby?” It adds a bit of nervy air that doesn’t need to be lingering around this withered ribcage.
Want to know how shaky this thing gets? There’s a fake Huey Lewis song on the soundtrack. That almost made me shut the movie off in anger. Then there’s a fake Tom Petty song, followed by a fake-out version of Tomoyasu Hotei’s iconic “Battle Without Honor or Humanity,” the track forever associated with Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
The third fake song finally turned my frown upside down. I realized that, yes, this is actually hilarious. Is Skydance so busy juggling its corporate ambitions that it couldn’t spring for the licensing fees on a forty-year-old Huey Lewis song?
Come on!
I wanted to ask who the filmmakers thought would even watch this thing. Then I realized the answer was me all along. I’m the sucker sitting there, shoveling this cinematic garbage into my face like Oscar the Grouch just opened a gourmet restaurant inside his trash can.
And the truly aggravating part? I wasn’t bored the entire time. I was occasionally entertained. I laughed, shaking my head in disbelief. How much worse it could get? That’s the strange magic of a movie this misguided. It can be a complete disaster and still give you something to talk about afterward.
But that doesn’t make it good.
Matchbox has all the ingredients for a silly, fun action comedy, yet somehow forgets the one thing its entire existence depends on: making Matchbox cars interesting. The movie has expensive action. It will occasionally take a big swing that surprises in an odd way. I most enjoyed those few moments of accidental comedy, yet it never finds a reason to exist beyond putting a familiar toy name on a generic blockbuster.
Actually, blockbuster is the wrong word. There are no more blocks to bust. This is straight-to-streaming content shot into the system solely to appease subscribers. This is a genre I’ve lovingly dubbed “Spackle“. And I await the next one with the same type of anticipation as I await my next seton replacement. It hurts, but I like that part where they put me under anesthesia.
John Cena, you absolute goofball. I hope the check cleared before you drove this car off the cliffs of cinema and into the bowels of bad movie Hell.
