Matchbox: The Movie: Less Toy Tie-In, More Discount Fast & Furious
For someone who writes for an arts and culture publication, sometimes I feel like I live under a rock. Maybe it’s just the sheer amount of stuff coming out that I can’t possibly have my eyeballs on everything. Case in point: Matchbox: The Movie. When I saw my first review for that, I was thinking, "like, the cars?" Yeah, like the cars. I thought Hollywood gave up on its obsession with making films with flimsy premises based on millennial and Gen X nostalgia, but then I remembered that Masters of the Universe and Barbie was a thing, so what the hell do I know?
Announced way back in 2022 as a partnership with Skydance, I assumed this would be another toy cash-grab. But its biggest sin isn't that it's based on a toy—it's that it's a generic spy movie wearing the Matchbox branding for reasons that feel barely earned. Unlike films like Battleship that really tried to shoehorn their premise to fit the source material, Matchbox just shows us a few small cars next to bigger cars every so often to remind us that this is, indeed, a Matchbox movie. Too bad everything else feels crammed and cliche–though I admit I did get some enjoyment out of it. Only just.
When I first discovered that Matchbox: The Movie was released on Apple TV, I started to watch a trailer for it, but that made me almost chicken out. Like a shot of bad grain alcohol with way too much proof, you need to shut off your tastebuds, tune out the protests from your brain, and just get that sucker in your stomach. So I threw it back and hoped I wouldn't go blind.
Within the first 10 minutes of the movie, we’re introduced to Smalley (Bill Camp), who gives us a brief history of Matchbox cars. His character, with his autoshop featuring a model train-style setup dedicated to Matchbox cars, serves as the nexus that brings together the film’s protagonists.
Sean Walker has a crush on Aimee, blows his chance, and then hard cut to almost 30 years later. Sean Walker (John Cena) is now a badass super spy. You can tell because he’s doing extra scary spy stuff, like stealing a nuclear warhead and delivering it to an arms dealer. It’s a whole basket of cliches, with Cena’s Walker brash, insubordinate, and highly capable. His handler and former partner Helen is played by Danai Gurira doing her best Viola Davis-as-Amanda Waller impression, just with a few more smiles than Waller typically dishes out.
After Walker successfully delivers the nuke, he finds out Matchbox lover and autoshop owner Smalley has died, prompting him to return to his hometown after 28 years away. While reconnecting with his friends, they’re all drugged and kidnapped by the CIA, who think they were Walker’s co-conspirators in this bomb heist.
Each of Walker’s friends in this ensemble—including Aimee played by Jessica Biel, Crosby (Sam Richardson), Ted (Arturo Castro) and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris)—spend the film mostly as just "Walker’s friends." There are a few half-hearted attempts at character building, one of which revolves around Crosby wanting his Leatherman back and Aimee wanting to drive because she’s a race car driver. The plot and characters are so by-the-numbers that I couldn’t have come up with a series of cliches quite as egregious as Matchbox: The Movie does. I would have rathered a clumsy attempt at making the movie about Matchbox cars than what the final product was.
Eventually, Walker decides to ditch his friends because they're slowing him down, and he is immediately captured. Through the power of friendship and some serious charisma rolls by Aimee, the gang secures a small fleet of vehicles to find and save their friend.
In the middle of the movie, during an action sequence with one of their friends hanging out of an ambulance while on fire, it cuts to a small kid playing with Matchbox cars. It was, until that moment, that I had forgotten the Matchbox tie-in. The moment was so absurd, I wished it would have leaned into utter absurdity, instead of trying the skirt the line between “realistic” and “barely believable.”
Matchbox: The Movie is barely about Matchbox cars. It ends up being a little bit of Fast and the Furious and a little bit of True Lies meets Grosse Pointe Blank with a small (tiny) pinch of The Road Warrior–but never as good as any one of those films were. It’s also full of the self-referential "wow, that just happened" style humor, and characters that are overused tropes. Matchbox: The Movie does little to encourage a new audience to check out the toy brand, nor does it serve as brand representation in any meaningful way. It is dumb, popcorn fun that is utterly missable.
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