‘Matchbox: The Movie’ Review: If Skydance’s Theatrical Releases Are as Blandly Algorithmic as Its Streaming Ones, Hollywood Is Already Dead

Credit where credit’s due: For a film that should never have been made or released in the first place, “Matchbox: The Movie” is somehow arriving at just the right time. Impeccably positioned as a potential harbinger of what’s to come, this bland and frictionless Skydance production — debuting on Apple TV a few short days after “Flyboys” star David Ellison finalized an $111 billion deal to consolidate what’s left of Hollywood under his control — is a perfect crystallization of our new god-king’s taste in cinema. Like “Ghosted,” “The Family Plan,” and “The Family Plan 2” before it (the latter two of which were also written by David Coggeshall), “Matchbox: The Movie” is an algorithmic chore about workaday Americans who get mixed up in some vaguely comedic spy action, the film’s execution so uninspired that its wish fulfillment premise assumes a tone of patronizing condescension — “what if your shitty little life enjoyed a sudden jolt of excitement?” can be a depressing conceit for a movie that can barely imagine that for itself. Like “Heart of Stone,” “Fountain of Youth,” and Michael Bay’s “6 Underground” (remember that one?), it plays less like a self-possessed piece of popcorn entertainment than it does a large adult son’s half-remembered idea of how movies used to feel. Like “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Without Remorse,” it takes the residual appeal of its IP for granted to the point that it fails to supply any appeal of its own. And though “Matchbox: The Movie” is much better than some of these early Skydance classics, its relative quality clarifies the most worrisome thing that’s shared between them: It’s not that all of them are bad, but rather that none of them seem particularly concerned with being good. Perhaps that will change when Ellison is forced to make his movies for theaters (as opposed to sending them straight to streaming, where quality is less of an issue). In the meantime, we’re left to deal with a motorless John Cena vehicle that adapts a popular brand of small toy cars designed for creative young children into a bloated adventure saga designed for and about dissatisfied suburban fortysomethings. Back in the ’90s, those fortysomethings used to be kids themselves (a movie theater marquee boasts showtimes for Stephen Sommers’ “Deep Rising,” which lingers in the air like an empty promise of what’s to come), and the tweenage ones in this film dubbed themselves “The Matchbox Gang” because they would all meet up at Bill Camp’s garage after school to… play with their toy cars? When “Deep Rising” is playing just down the street!? Sure, Jan. Anyway, “Matchbox: The Movie” doesn’t linger very long in the past — we’re only there long enough to be told that it happened, and that a Good Will Hunting-styled kid named Sean Walker had a big ol’ crush on the mechanic’s niece, Aimee. Alas, poor Sean had to move to Chicago, and he never had friends again. Sad! No matter: In a match(box)-cut worthy of “Lawrence of Arabia,” a flung toy car suddenly transforms into a real one as it flips through the Sahara a few decades later, the adult Sean (Cena) now behind the wheel as a group of vaguely Middle Eastern bad guys (the late ’90s are back!) chase the CIA agent in pursuit of the nuclear warhead he’s stolen from them. After successfully delivering the bomb to a different terrorist organization (gotta love the CIA!) and getting the all-clear from his agency handler (Danai Gurira), Sean is ordered to lie low for 10 days. What better time to return to his childhood home of Nowheresville, USA and check up on his old friends? For her part, the recently divorced Aimee seems to be making the best of things. She’s Jessica Biel now, which is nice for her, and she’s been able to channel her love of fast cars into a job as the most reckless ambulance driver east of the Mississippi. The rest of the gang is a slightly different story. Crosby (Sam Richardson) is an aerophobic blank whose fear of flying — and general lack of ambition — has come to the fore since his helicopter newslady wife Charmaine (Teyonah Parris) was offered an anchor job in Seattle. Ted (Arturo Castro), meanwhile, is a married gay high school teacher with three kids we never see and a penchant for setting himself on fire in class. That sounds like a pretty solid life aside from the self-immolation thing, but when you watch “Matchbox: The Movie” for a living it’s hard not to feel like everyone else is doing just fine. More to the point, the stock emotions of these non-characters aren’t nearly as relevant as the unique skills they bring to the table after CIA director Cory Stoll abducts Sean and his pals in the middle of their first group hang and threatens to do scary CIA stuff to them if they don’t retrieve that pesky nuke. Aimee can drive fast! Charmaine can fly! Ted can use the power of chemistry to blow stuff up! Crosby can… um… provide funny reaction shots when henchmen get killed! The Matchbox Gang isn’t exactly the X-Men, but Coggeshall’s script only needs to emphasize that childhood friends will never let you down, and that an undying love for the IP that made you happy as a kid is the only thing people really need to survive in this world/be of meaningful value to our risk-averse corporate overlords. While there are just a small handful of moments when “Matchbox” transmutes that lifelong bond into satisfying action beats (and so, so many moments when Sean’s normie friends helplessly flinch at his murder skills from the sidelines), “Extraction” director Sam Hargrave makes the most of the action he’s allowed. An early plane crash sequence puts that Skydance money to good use in between mediocre quips that seem forced upon these funny actors like a hostile takeover, and a subsequent highway chase gives every supporting character their own moment to shine while Cena — being Cena — calmly drives the setpiece forward with a clenched jaw and a few choice grins. It’s enough to give a brief glimpse as to what “Matchbox” might have been had anyone approached it with the boundless imagination of a child. For the most part, however, the film just vamps its way from Casablanca to Budapest with all the urgency of a Friday afternoon work meeting, albeit one that’s sporadically enlivened by drop-in appearances from Kristoffer Hivju and Golshifteh Farahani. What are they doing here, and why aren’t either of them used to fill out the laziest villain plot in recent memory? It’s galling how little “Matchbox” seems to care — how resistant it is towards using these detours to texture the gang’s dynamics, or to tease the afterthought of a romance between Sean and Aimee (though Farahani and Cena obviously make out). Everyone on the screen is extremely likable, and all of them feel like they’re in a commercial for a product they can’t remember. Was it a toy? Was it a car? Was it a world-eating mega-corporation? I don’t remember buying anything, and yet I felt poorer at the end of this movie than I did at the start. In a vacuum, “Matchbox: The Movie” wouldn’t be worth the energy it takes to resent. I always enjoy the sincerity of John Cena’s hard-working charm (even when his Cruise-ean need to entertain is betrayed by his lack of creative ambition), and Hargrave is as competent and inventive an action director as anyone in modern Hollywood. But in the context of its making, as a preview of what multiplexes could look like when Skydance fare dominates the big screen by default (absent the taste or competition that has kept the American movie industry alive on nothing but hope and occasional horror mega-hits), it’s as grim as these things get. As Bill Camp takes pains to remind us, the first Matchbox car was reverse-engineered from the size of the literal matchbox the inventor’s daughter used to smuggle her toys into school — it was a byproduct of thinking inside the box. That box has never felt smaller than it does here, and yet, even though the cars (and 18-wheeler trucks) in this movie are all full-sized, there’s somehow still plenty of room to spare. Grade: C- “Matchbox: The Movie” will be available to stream on Apple TV starting Friday, October 9.