Sean (John Cena) is a spy who returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral – only to be kidnapped along with his old friends. He’s been framed over a missing nuclear bomb, and must find the real thief to clear all their names…
It is possible to make a good film about a commercial product: Barbie proved that, and there were decent dramas about BlackBerry and Tetris. But it doesn’t follow that every brand is going to be golden fodder for filmmakers, and sadly this latest foray into branded content by Skydance shows that some concepts are destined for creative bankruptcy.
We open on what looks like an AI-generated aerial shot of an idyllic small town, a scene straight out of the ’50s but theoretically 1997. We meet a young Sean (Graham Harvey, later John Cena), who has a group of friends and a searing crush on Aimee (Reagan Marum, later Jessica Biel). He wants to express this crush by giving the motor-obsessed girl a Matchbox version of her dream car, so there’s a lengthy scene where their mentor Smalley (Bill Camp) waxes lyrical about the greatness of Matchboxes as a toy. Sean chickens out, and soon moves away, but 28 years later as a superspy, he’s still pining.
He goes home to attend Smalley’s funeral after his latest mission (retrieving a lost nuclear warhead), and reunites with his old friends, including Ted (Arturo Castro), Crosby (Sam Richardson) and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris). But Sean, Aimee and the gang are abducted and find that the warhead is missing and they’re the suspects. They must find it to clear their names, blah blah blah.
Capable cast like Corey Stoll, Danai Gurira and Golshifteh Farahani provide allyship/suspicious behaviour as needed, with Extraction director Sam Hargrave running the show. But none of it takes off. There’s no real connection here between the toy cars and the real vehicles they occasionally remember to drive around, so every reminder of the film’s title is jarring and a bit sad. The action is flat — particularly shocking given Hargrave’s history in stunts and previous films — and the characters forgettable. Cena and the gang are accomplished enough that they deliver a few laughs, but there’s no sense of connection there. It’s a car crash even when there are no cars crashing, and a terrible branding move for the toy company.
A risible mess of in-your-face product placement and overly familiar plotting, this can’t be saved even by a talented cast of comedians. You’d be better off playing with toy cars.
