The toy-movie trend scrapes the bottom of the bargain bin with Matchbox: The Movie

The plot trails after Sean and his friends, now grown and newly reunited after Cal’s untimely death, as they’re reluctantly involved in a rogue CIA agent’s plot to steal and deploy a nuclear warhead. At first there’s some mystery as to who’s the traitor among Sean’s CIA pals, but it’s soon untangled by Sean and his friends, including the heavy-machinery-operating Crosby (Richardson) and his helicopter-piloting wife Charmaine (Teyonah Parris). 

There’s some generic tension between Sean and his old pals, who spend most of the movie poking fun of Sean’s blandly cartoonish colleagues and lifestyle, as well as their own generic behavior once they’re slotted into Sean’s world, like when their motorcycle-riding schoolteacher buddy Ted (Castro) imitates Terminator 2: Judgment Day by shooting a truck with a shotgun, winking at us that, “Arnold made that look so much easier.” Soon after that, Ted kicks a guy out of a truck right after he throws a grenade at them; right before the guy blows up, Ted says: “Enjoy retirement.” It’s unclear what the joke here is, but presumably it’s on the viewers if we’re expecting much beyond DreamWorks-bland pop culture references and flop-sweat-soaked kitsch.

Among the movie’s stacked cast, nobody comes across like they know what they’re doing, except maybe Corey Stoll, who makes a meal of his one-note supporting role. Everyone else succumbs to their deliberately cheesy and often embarrassingly unfunny dialogue, the worst of which is meant to be somewhat dramatic, like when Sean’s stern CIA handler Ace (Danai Gurira) observes that, “Home doesn’t exist for people like us.”

The jokes aren’t much better though, like when Charmaine blows up bad guys with a missile and says, “Bye, bitch.” That over-the-top line and scenario might’ve been funny if the filmmakers showcased Parris’ comic line delivery instead of the bland computer-generated chaos. As it is, the scene’s a perfect example of the mirthless and tonally berserk Matchbox: The Movie. 

It’s still disappointing to see scene-stealing performers like Cena and Richardson reduced to tedious jokes that only underscore how thin their characterizations are, and how rushed their performances seem. They don’t talk like human beings or even like knowing archetypes, but rather as machines tasked with delivering schematic laugh lines and unconvincing dramatic kickers. There’s no meaningful distinction between the unintentionally funny earnestness—”We’re here for you, Sean, ride or die”—and painfully unfunny punchlines, like when Richardson snarks “How original” when two characters appear to ride off into the sunset. 

Matchbox: The Movie does fitfully come alive whenever it’s a John Cena showcase and not a tiresome group comedy. In these moments, Cena, Hargrave, and their stunt guys make Sean look like he could be an action hero worth caring about…until Cena must gracelessly muscle his way through some more rough dialogue, like when Sean snaps at his friends that his big “mistake wasn’t going away [from home], but coming back.” 

The biggest problem with Matchbox: The Movie isn’t that it’s a dumb, by-the-numbers action movie, but rather that it doesn’t know how to be both a parody of that kind of movie and an emotionally resonant defense of camaraderie-instilling group play. Barbie, and to a lesser extent all three of Christopher Miller and Phil Lord’s Lego Movies, made that balancing act look easy. Hargrave’s clearance-section knock-off suggests otherwise.

Director: Sam Hargrave
Writer: David Coggeshall
Starring: John Cena, Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Arturo Castro, Teyonah Parris
Release Date: October 9, 2026 (Apple TV)