What reviewers found in Matchbox The Movie: the stunts work, and the toy tie-in sinks John Cena's Apple TV filmWhat reviewers found in Matchbox The Movie: the stunts work, and the toy tie-in sinks John Cena's Apple TV film

Matchbox The Movie, Apple's action comedy based on Mattel's toy cars, began streaming on Apple TV worldwide on 9 October, and the first reviews are mostly negative.

The film stars John Cena as Sean, a CIA agent who returns to his home town and drags his childhood friends into a chase to recover a stolen nuclear warhead. Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris and Arturo Castro play the friends. Sam Hargrave, who made Extraction, directed it from a script by David Coggeshall, and Mattel and Skydance produced it. Apple held the world premiere at AMC Lincoln Square in New York on 5 October, according to Apple TV Press. Screen Rant puts the running time at 127 minutes. The film went straight to streaming, with no cinema release.

We read six reviews from outlets that saw the film themselves. When Screen Rant wrote on 8 October, the film had a 24 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes from 17 reviews.

What the reviews scored it

Where the reviewers agree

The action is the one thing most of them credit. The A.V. Club says Hargrave and his stunt team land a few of the fights and car chases, Collider calls the action well shot, and JoBlo singles out the explosions and chases while noting some poor computer effects. Collider's complaint is that the set pieces have no consequences, and it cites a character whose leg burns for half a minute without lasting harm.

Almost all of them say the script is the weak point. Collider finds the characters to be types rather than people. The A.V. Club calls the film programmatic, by-creative-committee dreck, and says the emotional scenes fall flat. IndieWire's David Ehrlich calls it an algorithmic chore and ties it to Skydance's earlier streaming action films, including Ghosted and The Family Plan, which Coggeshall also wrote.

Most of the reviews come back to the brand. JoBlo says the film feels like a 2-hour commercial and that its link to the toys is thin. But Why Tho? says the characters bring up Matchbox about every 20 minutes and the story would work the same without it. Screen Rant's own review blames the film's heavy use of the toy brand for sinking a fun premise.

Where they disagree

On Cena they split. JoBlo approves of a restrained performance played straight. Collider sees the same restraint as a waste of the comic timing Cena has shown in recent films. The jokes split them too. JoBlo says the film has fun with silly material, while But Why Tho? says the one-liners never land. Sam Richardson is the cast member Collider credits with the film's best comic moments.

Is Matchbox The Movie worth watching on Apple TV?

If you like a car chase and want something light, JoBlo's 6 out of 10 is the most generous verdict, and the action is the part every reviewer was happy with. If you want a film that is good as a film, every outlet we read says no, most of them firmly. No reviewer says it suits young children. JoBlo argues it is too grown-up for the children who play with the toys and does little for the adults who once collected them.

Our take

When we listed an October line-up led by Matchbox and Tenzing, we called Matchbox the test of whether Apple TV could run a broadly marketed event film on the strength of a toy brand and a famous lead. Going by the critics, the answer is no. The reviews do not say the brand failed to draw people in. They say it took over the film. The common complaint is not that Matchbox is badly made but that it is made to a template, and that template is the same streaming action comedy Apple has paid for before.

The A.V. Club makes the point through Barbie: what made Mattel's hit work was the people who made it, not the toy. Matchbox reverses that order. It starts from the brand and a star and fills in the rest, and the reviews read like a list of what gets lost when a film is made that way round.

The contrast with the same week is sharp. Apple TV's licensed comedy Small Prophets drew near-unanimous praise from critics, and it has a fraction of Matchbox's marketing. Apple's best reviews keep coming from small, specific shows, while its big-budget films keep getting middling ones.

Two things none of the reviews could tell us. Apple does not publish viewing figures, so we will not learn whether a heavily trailed film on every Apple TV home screen finds an audience despite its reviews. Nor did any reviewer comment on how it looks or sounds at home, which is where everyone will watch it. APPDOOK's reading is that Matchbox will be judged inside Apple on how many people it brought to Apple TV, not on its Rotten Tomatoes score, and that is the one number we are least likely to see.