If you grew up in the halcyon days of physical media — before streaming was invented, and “buying” a movie meant you actually “owned” it — you probably remember some the era’s amusing quirks. My favorite? When you rented a movie on video cassette, took it home, popped it in the VCR, and only then found out some mischievous little scamp switched movies. You thought you were renting Michael Radford’s heartwarming, Oscar-nominated romance “The Postman,” and instead you got a laughable post-apocalyptic shitstorm directed by Kevin Costner, which also happened to be called “The Postman.”
It’s harder to make that mistake in the age of streaming, so in a pique of nostalgia, the folks at Apple TV made it for us. The new original action comedy “Matchbox: The Movie” has so little to do with Mattel’s Matchbox toys it feels like we’re watching the wrong film. At the beginning someone buys a Matchbox car for a girl they like, and someone else explains how the toy line was originally invented. Later, someone refers to their childhood friends as “The Matchbox Gang,” even they though never called themselves that before. And yes, some of the action sequences have cars but only a few. You might as well change the name of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” to “Lincoln Logs: The Movie” if this is the standard for toy adaptations these days.
“Matchbox: The Movie” is the latest big budget, all-star, quippy action flick that streaming services inexplicably love so much. It belongs on the same virtual shelf as “Red Notice,” “Ghosted,” “The Gray Man,” “Fountain of Youth,” “Back in Action,” “The Union” and a plethora of other extremely expensive, extremely forgettable time-wasters. If I told you I made one of those titles up you’d probably believe me, but I didn’t.
“Matchbox” was, however, directed by Sam Hargrave, whose two “Extraction” movies were genuinely ambitious shoot-‘em-ups with dizzying one-take wonder action sequences. The stories were practically non-existent and the characters were cardboard cut-outs, but Hargrave worked overtime to compensate for those deficiencies. That same ecstatic sense of cinematic saturnalia is sadly missing from “Matchbox: The Movie,” although Hargrave does occasionally put together a spectacular car crash. The climactic chase scene is a hoot.
After the world’s worst CGI establishing shot ever, we meet a group of kids living in small town America in 1998. Sean has a crush on Aimee, whose uncle is a car mechanic. He wants to declare his love with the gift of her ultimate dream car, but he’s a child so he settles for the Matchbox version. He fumbles, then finds out his dad is moving out of town, so he gives up completely, and suddenly transforms into John Cena.
Oh, if only that transformation had been literal, like in “An American Werewolf in London.” But no, the movie just cuts decades into the future. Sean is now a secret agent working for the CIA, stealing a nuclear warhead from a non-specific enemy warlord. His boss, played by Danai Gurira, tells him to lay low afterwards, so he returns home for Aimee’s uncle’s funeral and reconnects with his old friends.
Aimee (Jessica Biel) is now a race-car driver. Crosby (Sam Richardson) works in construction, operating heavy machinery. He married Charmaine (Teyonah Parris), who flies the local traffic copter — although why their tiny town needs a traffic copter when there’s apparently only one road is never explained. Ted (Arturo Castro) became a high school chemistry teacher. They’re still good friends and they’re glad to see Sean, who fell off the face of the Earth decades ago, until they’re all drugged and wake up on an airplane, accused of stealing that nuclear warhead for themselves.
There are lots of spy movies where a badass action hero drags a normal person along for the ride, and not just the wacky comedies. James Bond spent most of his career on escort missions with normies, although usually one at time (and unlike Sean he slept with almost all of them). The somewhat amusing twist in “Matchbox: The Movie” is Sean has to babysit a weirdly large ensemble of regular folks who would rather be doing anything else, even if their skills do come in handy along the way.
“Matchbox: The Movie” is one of the most entertaining generic streaming action comedies, which says very little. The set pieces are sometimes exciting, even though the jokey tone undersells the danger. The screenplay by David Coggeshall — who also wrote Apple’s “Family Plan” movies, which even I forgot existed — competently pulls these whimsical, archetypal characters from one location to the next, and remembers to make the stakes personal once in a while so the audience will give a damn.
But the reason “Matchbox” works, at all, is because of its cast. In most of these “Red Notice”-esque films, which have almost as much artistic value as white noise, the actors are ust collecting a paycheck. The cast of “Matchbox” are actually trying to imbue this film with humor and character. There are cringe-worthy jokes in Sam Hargrave’s film that miraculously become funny, just because Sam Richardson added a little unexpected gesture to his reaction shot. Jessica Biel spends the whole film looking like she’s in mourning, even after the nonsensical plot kicks in, because her beloved uncle just died and a real human being wouldn’t be able to brush that aside right away.
All of these efforts conspire to make “Matchbox: The Movie” amusingly useless, which in this context counts as a compliment. Some movies want to be a part of our lives forever, others just want to have fun for a couple hours and then walk out on us, never to be heard from again. If all fair-weather films were as good as “Matchbox: The Movie” that would be… well, that would be disappointing, but on its own this one is okay.
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