‘Matchbox: The Movie’ Apple TV Review: A Would-Be Blockbuster Reduced to Toy Size

In The Studio, one of the running jokes in an episode involves hiring Martin Scorsese to direct a movie based on the Kool-Aid Man, the mascot of the famous powdered drink. It won’t be the first or last brand to try to make its way into Hollywood with movies that double as advertising campaigns. Mattel, in particular, knows a thing or two about this. Barbie: The Movie did incredibly well, so its executives must have wondered what other product they could take down a similar path. Matchbox cars, of course! You don’t even need a script to make that movie. Just put some little cars in motion and you’re done.

That is more or less what Matchbox: The Movie is, a big-budget production that, judging by its direct release on Apple TV, is unlikely to enjoy the critical glory or box-office success of Barbie. I suppose nobody expected it to, since not a single original idea has fallen through the cracks here. The movie is little more than a knockoff of the countless action films that go straight to streaming, a miniaturized version (yes, just like the cars) of the old big-screen blockbusters. Everything is the same, only smaller, repeated, reformulated.

The movie offers about ten minutes of fun during which you might think you’re in for something retro, a sort of ’90s kids-on-an-adventure movie, but that doesn’t last long. It is mostly an excuse to introduce the characters and, above all, THE PRODUCT. The group of friends at the center of the story consisted of five kids who were obsessed with the tiny cars and even called themselves “The Matchbox Gang.” But before Sean can work up the nerve to tell Aimee he loves her, he leaves the small Ohio town where they live when his father decides to move the family to Chicago. He loses touch with her and the other three members of his childhood gang.

Nearly thirty years later, Sean has the body and face of John Cena, so obviously we find him in the middle of an action sequence. This time he is a CIA undercover agent involved in an operation in the desert involving the capture of a nuclear warhead or something along those lines. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the man gets the job done and, upon returning home, learns that Aimee’s uncle, Smalley (Bill Camp), the friendly mechanic who first got them hooked on Matchbox cars, has died. He travels back to town, reconnects with his old friends and, during a night out, they realize they are all being pursued by someone who wants that nuclear warhead. Or something like that.

The adult Aimee, played by Jessica Biel, is now a skilled race-car driver; Ted (Arturo Castro) is a gay, married schoolteacher with children; and the other two, Charmaine (Teyonnah Parris) and Crosby (Sam Richardson), are a journalist and a contractor who are also a couple. None of them has any idea what Sean actually does for a living, much less how to handle themselves in the middle of an action sequence. But that’s what John Cena is there for, getting them in and out of trouble again and again as the chases become increasingly bigger and more elaborate. Along the way, they will have to deal with an internal CIA betrayal involving Agent Mosier (Corey Stoll), Agent Helen (Danai Gurira), or perhaps some other suspicious-looking character wandering around in the background.

From that point on, the director of the Extraction franchise forgets about any particular qualities this movie might have and proceeds to shoot a series of lengthy action sequences as if he were making yet another sequel to that other series of films. Sure, there is some room along the way for jokes, misunderstandings, romantic tension and a few touches that seem to have been made by and for actual human beings. But most of the running time is devoted to watching this gang travel from one international location to another while battling the people who will eventually be revealed as their enemies.

It is 128 minutes of unrelenting tedium, a barrage of chases that are reasonably well shot but completely uninteresting because there never seems to be anything at stake. The sequences are so dull and so long that you almost wish the movie were an even more straightforward commercial, simply showing the little cars themselves, if only to get some scenes written and filmed by and for human beings. It probably would have been better to make a movie out of that brief ’90s sequence with a group of kids playing with their Matchbox cars. Once they grow up, they take whatever little charm Matchbox had with them.