You were surprised by The LEGO Movie. Wowed by Barbie. Won over by Transformers One. Giddy by the time credits rolled on Travis Knight's Masters Of
You were surprised by The LEGO Movie. Wowed by Barbie. Won over by Transformers One. Giddy by the time credits rolled on Travis Knight’s Masters Of The Universe. Now, prepare to put the hype pedal to the metal for… Matchbox The Movie! Yes, Mattel’s metal automobiles have inspired Apple TV — and Extraction director Sam Hargrave — to create a modern toyetic thrill-ride, this one a globe-trotting caper starring John Cena as an undercover CIA Agent who finds himself accidentally roping his Matchbox-loving childhood pals (including the Jessica Biel!) into a world-saving mission. Sounds barmy, right? It looks it, too — check out the trailer below;
Well, well, well, you could say that this looks like another, er, rapid and furious actioner for our man John Cena, couldn’t you? But while there’s more than a subdued, diesel-y whiff of another petrolhead franchise about Matchbox The Movie, this first trailer for Sam Hargrave’s latest looks like the Extraction man and his starry cast — including the likes of Sam Richardson, Arturo Castro, Teyonah Parris, Corey Stoll, Bill Camp, Golshifteh Farahani and Danai Gurira — are having a lot of fun digging into a cinematic toy box filled with things ripe for the crashing, smashing, bashing and otherwise throwing together in adrenalised action set pieces peppered with a real tongue-in-cheek genre self-awareness. A moment where a baddie threatens to chuck Cena’s CIA agent and his drugged friends out of a plane earns a well-deserved “only bad guys say that” from Richardson, while quick cuts between die-cast childhood chaos and grown-up car-nage promises the Matchbox element of Hargrave’s movie is more than a mere branding exercise.
And here’s the official synopsis for Matchbox The Movie: “Inspired by the iconic Mattel toys, “Matchbox The Movie” is an action-packed, globetrotting adventure about a group of friends since childhood who have their lives upended when undercover CIA agent Sean (John Cena), their long-absent former leader, returns to their small town and unwittingly gets them embroiled in a frantic international pursuit to save the world.”
Directed by Hargrave from a script by David Coggeshall (The Deliverance), Matchbox The Movie is set to race onto Apple TV on 9 October. Here’s hoping with veritable charisma cannon Cena leading the line-up, action man Hargrave calling the shots, and what already looks to be a genuinely quite sweet through-line about the ways in which the bonds made as children playing can prepare us to yeet shotguns while trying to recover missing nuclear warheads as adults, this will be a bit of a banger — and not the streaming equivalent of a peg-warmer. Fingers crossed!
