When is a film more than a film? When it is Excavator, the Tom Cruise vehicle that spectacularly bombed into theaters last week like the last sliver of light from a dying star. Excavator, which cost $150 million, is the last feature film released by Warner Bros. before the century-old studio was transformed into a larger media giant that would come to be known as Skydance, and as such its failure became thematically buoyant. While it wasn’t the reason co-chairs Pam Abdy and Mike DeLuca were forced out, it capped a series of early releases under their leadership this year, serving as a reminder that the same willingness to bet on big swings that gave Sinners And Weapons also gave rise to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s misfortune The Bride! If you want you can see ExcavatorThe defeat of as evidence of the waning appeal of movie stars or the difficulty of convincing audiences of original material or a growing corporate intolerance of criticism from the rich and powerful. But if we’re going to do stuff Excavator with all this baggage, it only seems right that we do the same thing with another movie preparing for the merger – Matchbox: the film, which arrives on Apple TV today.
We will never know if Matchbox: the film is a failure because it went straight to streaming, a black box of audience information. I doubt most people even realize the movie exists. But while it may not have cost $150 million, it obviously wasn’t cheap as it’s an action comedy full of car chases and vehicles flying through the air and stars John Cena as CIA agent Sean Walker, who unwittingly involves his group of childhood friends in a globe-trotting adventure. And it’s bad. Not like some people think Excavator (which I really like) is bad, where someone – like director Alejandro González Iñárritu – had a vision that really didn’t work. Matchbox: the film is bad in that aimless way where it’s clear that no one, from director Sam Hargrave (Extraction) to writer David Coggeshall, to the dozens of cast members and hundreds of crew members, knows why they are there, other than to collect a paycheck. No one is involved in Matchbox: the film it seems like they would be able to explain why the movie exists, which makes you wonder why on earth anyone would watch it.
Matchbox: the film it stinks in a thousand relatively minor, noncommittal ways that end up feeling far worse than a larger, more personal disaster. It never understands what it means to make a film based on a line of small cars or explains why these small cars make sense. This barely gives us a chance to see how the group of middle schoolers whose story begins with bonding and playing with cars – perhaps because they’ve already moved past the practice, with young Sean having moved on to a fierce crush on fellow student Aimee. Then Sean moves away and grows up to become a spy who, after completing a mission involving smuggling a nuclear warhead for unknown reasons, decides to pay an impromptu visit to his teenage friends. At this point, they’re all drugged and black-bagged by the CIA’s new director of operations (played by Corey Stoll, no less), who believes Sean stole the warhead and immediately resorts to beatings to let him know where it is.
Aimee (Jessica Biel), Crosby (Sam Richardson), Ted (Arturo Castro), and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris) go from behaving inexplicably suspicious of Sean and his motives despite the kidnapping and torture, to deciding just as abruptly that they must stay by his side and risk everything to help him. The film is initially about violence in a way that suggests it was first intended as a family business with Sean ostensibly in it. not killing the people he fights and suffering criticism 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. While it’s tempting to read these tonal shifts as signs of the studio’s destruction, there doesn’t seem to be much of the vision to be altered in the first place. Matchbox: the film is filled with bits that never quite fit the jokes they’re supposed to be, like Crosby’s love of the Leatherman he always carries, but his attempts at emotional appeal are also odd and generic; it’s difficult to invest in characters who are still extremely stuck to who they were in middle school. Maybe you just can’t expect much from a movie inspired by a line of small cars. At least Masters of the Universe, Mattel’s previous adaptation, had some lore to build on.
This raises the question of why Matchbox: the film was considered a profitable bet. It was produced by David Ellison, CEO of Skydance Corporation, 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 today one of the most powerful media moguls in the world. And Matchbox: the film is an example of Ellison’s general approach to films, one that will shape the 30 he has promised to release in theaters each year. It’s an approach focused on intellectual property, remakes, adaptations and legacy sequels. This is no longer what a few years ago might have been described as a cautious approach, not when the public is creating titles out of nowhere like Obsession And Behind the scenes into buzzy hits and looking for something new. But it’s safe in another way. While Excavator I tried something, Matchbox: the film aims for nothing – it can’t really fail because there is no expectation. This can only pleasantly surprise by being tolerable, but in this case it really isn’t. If this utterly uninspired film is worthy of attention, it’s only as a potential key text for what the new Frankensteined Skydance Corporation is likely to offer us in the future, especially with Ellison bringing in former Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz to co-lead the company: projects built on brand synergy and a premise of nostalgia and not trying at all.
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