The friends in Matchbox the Movie have an experience more people can recognize than the international plot they stumble into. You can know somebody well at the age when a toy car feels like the beginning of a whole world and have very little idea what that person has done with the intervening decades. The movie’s decision to treat the reunion as part of the action pays off whenever there is a little time for the mismatch to show. John Cena can play the person who knows what to do in an emergency and has missed important parts of the lives of the people he wants to help.
Sam Hargrave is an intelligent choice for material that needs a car to communicate something by moving across a frame. The associations of the Mattel name place a particular demand on the action. A collection can offer pleasure before anybody has found a reason to send the cars somewhere. A film has to show why one of them is going at a given speed and what will happen to the people inside it if it arrives. Hargrave is most convincing when a line of movement can be read in advance and the performers have to live through the consequences of choosing it.
Biel’s Aimee has the right sort of practical experience to bring into a movie built around pursuit. The film makes her an EMT and a racing enthusiast, which gives her at least two well-established reasons to be quick and a third to think about the safety of whoever happens to be in the vehicle with her. That combination is more specific than a general revelation that an old friend can hold her own in an action movie. It suggests a way to make the other members of the group valuable for reasons their friendship could never have anticipated.
Jessica Biel, Arturo Castro, Sam Richardson and Teyonah Parris bring enough differences in pace and attitude to make the group entertaining at rest. A reunion has a useful embarrassment built into it. Somebody remembers a version of you that you have spent years giving other people no reason to suspect. The script can leave the distinction unexamined while a threat is close. Some of the small pauses are valuable because an actor gets a chance to show what feels natural with an old friend and what now requires effort. The emergency has a reason to keep pulling them back into contact even when their adult judgment might tell them to leave things alone.
The cut to a child at an outdoor café playing with Matchbox cars has a sly honesty about the scale of the enterprise. A child can invent the danger and the solution in the same gesture. The camera can return to the full-size chase with a sharper sense of how much of its pleasure comes from seeing someone arrange a problem in space. The moment works because it is brief. A movie trying to make every beat deliver a reminder of the brand would make it harder to believe that these cars have arrived in the frame for any reason of their own.
There is an occasional imbalance between the vehicle work and the script’s generosity toward the supporting performers. A well-timed cut in a chase can communicate something much quicker than a line about the friend who has just completed it. Richardson and Parris can supply a response that tells us who in the group was prepared to trust the driver and who has some questions about how the decision was made. In those moments the ensemble becomes more than a collection of passengers. The movie’s explanations of where everybody needs to go generally offer less than its brief views of how they take the journey.
At more than two hours the adventure has plenty of room to provide an answer for every member of the group. Some of those answers are easy to anticipate once the friends begin to compare their adult lives. The movie is more appealing when it lets a personality enter the action before giving it an arc. Cena’s assurance can be funny in the presence of people who remember an earlier and less effective model of it. That is a better engine for the film than the people who want the audience to keep track of the conspiracy.
