Thought Digger Was Bad? Well, Consider Matchbox: The Movie

When is a movie more than a movie? When it’s Digger, the Tom Cruise vehicle that bombed spectacularly in theaters last week like the last burst of light from a dying star. Digger, which cost a reported $150 million, is the final feature to be released by Warner Bros. before the century-old studio gets folded into a larger media behemoth that will known as Skydance, and as such, its failure has become thematically load-bearing. Though it wasn’t the reason co-chairs Pam Abdy and Mike DeLuca were pushed out, it capped off a run of rough releases under their leadership this year, a reminder that the same willingness to bet on big swings that yielded Sinners and Weapons also yielded Maggie Gyllenhaal’s unfortunate The Bride! If you’d like, you can see Digger’s defeat as proof of movie stars’ fading appeal or the difficulty in selling audiences on original material or an increasing corporate intolerance for criticism of the wealthy and powerful. But if we’re going to stuff Digger with all that baggage, it only seems fair we do the same to another movie bookending the merger — Matchbox: The Movie, which lands on Apple TV today.

We’ll never know if Matchbox: The Movie is a flop because it went straight to streaming, a black box of viewership info. I doubt most people will even register that the movie exists. But while it may not have cost $150 million, it obviously wasn’t cheap because it’s an action comedy full of car chases and vehicles flipping through the air and it stars John Cena as CIA agent Sean Walker, who involuntarily involves his childhood friend group in a globe-trotting adventure. And it is bad. Not in the way some people think Digger (which I’m actually kind of fond of) is bad, where someone — like director Alejandro González Iñárritu — had a vision that really didn’t work. Matchbox: The Movie is bad in that aimless way where it is clear that no one, from director Sam Hargrave (Extraction) to writer David Coggeshall to the dozens of actors and hundreds of crew members, knows why they’re there, other than to collect a paycheck. No one involved in Matchbox: The Movie seems like they’d be able to make a case for why the movie exists, which makes you wonder why on earth anyone would watch it.

Matchbox: The Movie stinks in a thousand relatively minor and noncommittal ways that end up feeling so much worse than a grand and more personal disaster would. It never figures out what it means to make a movie based on a line of toy cars nor conveys why those toy cars are meaningful. It barely gives us a chance to see how the group of middle-schoolers the story starts with bond over and play with the cars — maybe because they’ve already outgrown the practice by then with young Sean having moved on to a fierce crush on fellow member Aimee. Then Sean moves away and grows up to become a spy who, after wrapping up a mission involving smuggling a nuclear warhead for reasons unknown, decides to pay an impromptu visit to his tweenage buddies. At that point, they’re all drugged and black-bagged by the incoming CIA director of operations (played by Corey Stoll, no less), who believes Sean stole the warhead and immediately resorts to beatings to get its whereabouts out of him.

Aimee (Jessica Biel), Crosby (Sam Richardson), Ted (Arturo Castro), and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris) go from acting inexplicably suspicious of Sean and his motives despite the kidnapping and torture to just as abruptly deciding they need to stick by his side and risk everything to help him out. The movie is initially squirrelly about violence in a way that suggests it was first conceived as a family-friendly enterprise with Sean pointedly not killing the people he fights and taking flak from Aimee for wanting to shoot people. However, by the end, he’s blowing up dudes with grenades while delivering quips like the star of an ’80s muscle movie. Though it’s tempting to read these tonal switchbacks as signs of studio mangling, it doesn’t feel like there was much vision to be messed with in the first place. Matchbox: The Movie is filled with bits that never quite add up to the jokes they’re meant to be, like Crosby’s love for the Leatherman he always carries, but its attempts at emotional appeal are also strange and generic; it’s hard to invest in characters still extremely stuck on who they were in middle school. Maybe you just can’t hope for much from a movie inspired by a line of toy cars. At least Masters of the Universe, the previous Mattel adaptation, had lore to pull from.

That raises the question of why Matchbox: The Movie was considered a worthwhile bet at all. It was produced by Skydance Corporation CEO David Ellison, a man who — thanks to the efforts of his father, Larry, one of the richest people in the world, and the series of corporate consolidations they engineered — is now one of the most powerful media moguls around. And Matchbox: The Movie is an example of Ellison’s general approach to films, one that will shape the 30 he’s promised to put in theaters each year. It’s an approach centered on IP, on remakes and adaptations and legacy sequels. That’s no longer what, a few years ago, might have been described as a cautious approach, not when audiences are making out-of-nowhere titles like Obsession and Backrooms into buzzy hits and craving something new. But it’s safe in another way. While Digger tried for something, Matchbox: The Movie aims for nothing — it can’t really fail because there are no expectations. It can only pleasantly surprise by being tolerable, but in this case, it’s really not. If this utterly uninspired movie deserves to get attention, it’s only as a potential key text to what the new Frankensteined Skydance Corporation is likely to give us in the future, especially with Ellison having brought on former Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz to co-run the company: projects that are built on brand synergy and an assumption of nostalgia and don’t try at all.