After a windy road, this week it finally happened. The day that Hollywood, and many of those who are invested in it, had been dreading, the grimly inevitable disappearance of Warner Bros as it was consumed by what is now known as Paramount. The two once-classic studios will become one – Skydance, the David Ellison-owned company that has infinitely more money than common sense or base-level creativity.
The week has seen many, including the Guardian, speculate about what we may be able to expect, what kind of films the billion-dollar behemoth might now be releasing. Warners after all has created classics such as Casablanca, The Exorcist and 2001: A Space Odyssey while Paramount has been behind The Godfather, Chinatown and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just imagine what the combined might of these two prestigious, industry-defining studios could achieve with the promise of 30-plus theatrical releases a year, huge amounts of money and considerable manpower at play.
Arriving just days after the deal was made official, Skydance’s Matchbox: the Movie suggests that the future is even bleaker than we had anticipated.
Like most of the company’s previous films, it’s an empty-headed, synthetically made action film cobbled together as if by machinery only, so lacking in personality or even vigour that it’s impossible to believe anyone involved was there for anything but an undeserved paycheck. It’s a two-hour Apple TV film based on the Matchbox toy vehicle line, a sentence no one should have had to hear in this lifetime, and it’s exactly as disposable and dead-eyed as that would imply.
How would that film make any sense, one might ask, and well it doesn’t, the toy awkwardly used as a way to bond a group of young friends in the 90s before leaping forward to present day as they reunite. One of them (John Cena) has become a super spy and after he returns home for a funeral, he accidentally involves his childhood gang (Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris and Arturo Castro playing gay – LGBTQ+ representation in a Matchbox movie, we did it!) in a mission to save a nuclear warhead. Cue antics and vehicles and lines like “Maybe I need to think inside the box” as if a Mattel exec was on set insisting on as many nods as humanly possible.
The action comedy has become the most depressingly common, and most reliably awful, streaming genre and Matchbox, despite whatever loosely defined IP it’s attached to, might not be the worst but it’s among the most aggressively anonymous. The worst remains Apple’s Chris Evans-Ana de Armas multi-vehicle pile-up Ghosted (another Skydance classic!) but that film’s awfulness and utter incompetence did at least make it drunkenly entertaining, a satisfyingly punchable piñata. There’s no joy to be had in ribbing this one, it’s more competently made (by Sam Hargrave, a stuntman turned director of the Extraction franchise) but it’s just so devoid of colour, its stench the result of total no-tries blandness (thanks to a script from David Coggeshall, whose credits include hokey horrors The Deliverance and Orphan: First Kill).
Dialogue feels consistently, boringly AI-generated throughout and while textured characters would have been unfair to expect here, it’s not a stretch to hope for some mild laughs along the way. But the comedy is of the predictably smug and quippy variety, the kind of film where a character is mid-action telling someone on the phone that they’re “a little busy right now”. The pairing of a slick super agent with regular civilians is also so exhaustingly overdone at this stage and despite what could have maybe been a slightly more interesting angle – young friends transplanting a playground dynamic to a globe-hopping, bomb-exploding action stage – it’s just more of the “woah, he just did that!” bumbling that even the cast seem bored with. A plasticky, unenthused Cena is stuck in autopilot once again (I think that button might actually be broken) while a similarly flat Biel, bizarrely choosing this as her first film in almost a decade, makes zero effort to convincingly play anyone but herself, styled up as if she walked to set from home (a petrol-stained small town ambulance-driving car enthusiast she is not).
I wasn’t a big fan of Greta Gerwig’s overpraised Barbie but it was at least a respectably large swing, a smart enough justification for why Mattel might actually need a Hollywood arm. But this is exactly what we should more reasonably anticipate from their output (Jon M Chu’s Hot Wheels and Vin Diesel’s Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots are both on the way). No one needed a Matchbox movie that dissected toxic masculinity or used toy cars as a metaphor for anything, but no one really needed a Matchbox movie in the first place. As boredom swept over me during the film’s truly punishing runtime, I imagined better ways to mash the words Matchbox and movie together. I came to the natural conclusion that doing so would be obviously ungodly but even my worst idea was better than “what if another sloppy streaming action comedy but with Matchbox mentions?” Ellison and Skydance have amassed a great deal of power and capital in Hollywood but junk like this is a glum warning sign of what will be done with it.
Matchbox: the Movie is out on Apple TV+ on 9 October
