Former Matchbox car lovers and childhood friends meet up as adults and are pulled into a dangerous spy-game hunt for a stolen nuclear weapon. Matchbox the Movie tips its hat to the value of friendship. But this overblown spy story is filled with foul language and gun-blazing, bad guy-pounding, car-smashing violence—making it less than kid-friendly.
Back when Sean Walker was a kid in the late ‘90s, he loved two things: Matchbox cars and Aimee Smalley.
Sean and his friends would spend their afternoons playing with their collections of Matchbox vehicles on a large table decorated with a model village and roads. It was all set up in the back of Cal’s Garage and Salvage.
That group—including Sean, nerdy Ted, nervous-guy Crosby, rambunctious Charmaine and the pretty Aimee—called themselves the “Matchbox Gang.” And, of course, Aimee was the most important part, if you’d asked Sean.
In fact, Sean had a plan to let Aimee know about his feelings. He had hunted down and purchased a classic 1969 Super Camero Matchbox for her—the car she declared was her dream car—and he was going to give it to her and tell her how much she meant to him.
That was just before Sean’s dad got a new job and whisked the boy off to Chicago with no forewarning. So, the declaration of love never happened. And Sean left without a word.
Now, in 2026, the members of the Matchbox Gang have all grown up. Ted became a science teacher. Crosby is in heavy-equipment construction work. Charmaine is a local helicopter pilot and eye-in-the-sky reporter. And Aimee never lost her love for cars. She races in NASCAR.
Oh, and Sean became a spy.
Yeah, somehow the average-looking Sean managed to put on a hundred pounds or so of solid muscle and become an agent with the CIA. He’s had absolutely no communication with his former pals, for obvious reasons. But after Aimee’s uncle Cal dies, Sean comes back to town to show his respect for the man.
The former friends meet up again and are shocked to see the changes in Sean. A lot can happen in 28 years. They decide to honor Cal and the old days by having a quick drink together. … They wake up sometime later in the storage bay of a C130 military transport aircraft.
Obviously, Sean declares, they’ve all been nabbed by someone who was tracking him. How is that obvious?! the four civilian captives proclaim. Sean explains that their captors mistakenly believe that they’re all in on his secret mission involving a stolen nuclear warhead. What? Why is this happening? What has the extremely muscular and incredibly secretive Sean accidentally gotten them all into?
The more important question, however, is how can this gaggle of old friends use their combined skills to find a way out?
The five friends all fight diligently for one another. Sean actually wants to keep his four friends in a safe house to protect them from harm, but the others opt to do what they can to protect him as well.
As part of that rally-to-Sean’s-defense process, Ted talks about Sean standing up to bullies on his behalf when they were both kids—and literally saving his life. “There’s nothing and no one that’s going to stop me from saving [Sean],” Ted declares.
Eventually, the four friends save the lives of many potential victims by working together to disarm a nuclear warhead. Aimee proclaims that her uncle Cal was “the father I never had.”
None.
As this spy tale unfolds, things eventually get a bit sensual. Aimee dons a dress that is cut all the way down to her navel in the front and to the top of her backside in the rear. (How it actually continues to keep her covered is costume magic.) A Russian spy openly flirts with Aimee.
When Sean meets up with an attractive female contact (who’s dressed in an open suit jacket with no shirt beneath), they embrace and kiss. This woman also kisses Aimee’s hand repeatedly in a seductive gesture. Aimee and Sean also kiss.
Ted announces that he has been married to a man named Bryan for eight years, and they have three children. (We later see the couple arm-in-arm.)
I suppose the main connection with Matchbox toys is supposed to be the way this movie has lots of vehicles flipping, jumping and crashing in over-the-top action stunts and high-speed chases.
For instance: An offroad vehicle backs over a mountaintop and uses its winch as a grappling hook; a huge tractor trailer speeds over a ramp and nosedives into the pavement, smashing the truck into chunks and pieces; another huge vehicle is sent hurtling off a 30-story bridge accompanied by a fiery explosion; a C130 aircraft crash-lands in the ocean and sinks; a helicopter gets riddled with bullets and sent, flaming, to the ground; rockets hit UTVs and launch them, exploding, into the air; a Mustang speeds under a tractor trailer, sheering off its roof; motorbikes and their riders flip end-over-end in massive crashes; etc.
Ted uses his chemical knowhow to create fiery concoctions. (In some cases, they have a desired explosive effect, other times they accidentally set areas and people aflame.) He uses an exploding oxygen tank to flip a speeding truck. Grenades are detonated and, in one case, thrown into the lap of a man who’s then pushed (to explosive effect) onto the highway.
Most of the violence is delivered in the mano a mano form of Sean pounding on small groups of male and female agents in moving vehicles, on rooftops, off balconies and down stairways. The thumping battles are generally lightly bloody and leave the losers unconscious or potentially dead. Gunfights break out as well. Foes are shot and thrown from high places or out of moving vehicles. Sean gets shot in the shoulder, stabbed in the side and beaten senseless on several occasions. A pair of agents get hit by a skidding truck and smashed between the vehicle and a wall.
A CIA deputy director threatens to attach electrodes to innocent people’s genitals to illicit information. A large bomb is purposely placed near a heavily populated area in an effort to kill potentially hundreds of thousands to millions of people and start a massive war. (The plot is foiled.)
The movie’s dialogue contains more than a dozen s-words and a handful of uses each of the words “d–n,” “h—,” “a–” and “b–ch.” Jesus’ name and God’s name are both misused a total of 17 times (one or two of those blending God with “d–n”).
Crude references are made to male genitals.
Throughout the film, the five friends have opportunities in a bar, at parties and in a casino to drink beer, champagne, glasses of scotch, shots of vodka and martinis.
Shots of vodka drunk earlier in the movie are laced with a sedative called chloral hydrate, Sean later declares. The sedative knocks the friends out long enough for the kidnappers to make their move.
We see the friends purposely drawing attention while drinking heavily and gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars. The CIA casually uses “national security” as a means to frame Sean’s friends as terrorists and ruin their lives. (Then the agency casually makes all those accusations disappear later.)
When you hear the title, Matchbox the Movie, you instantly think that this pic is going to be focused on, well, toy cars—in the same way a LEGO movie actually incorporates LEGO blocks. And being a “spy” movie, perhaps that construct would turn out to be a winking James Bond-like flick that creatively blends in tiny magical automobiles.
However, this John Cena-starring vehicle has very little to do with toy cars or their imaginative vroom-vroom thrills. Matchbox the Movie is actually much closer to a story that kids might dream up on a lazy summer afternoon while playing with little metal cars and trucks.
Problem is, this kiddish tale has adult sensibilities.
There’s enough foul language, enough same-gender couple references and just enough fall-on-your-face-from-a-speeding-vehicle violence in Matchbox the Movie that it’s not really something that welcomes kids at all. (You know, the audience that would appreciate those Mattel toys.)
For adults who might otherwise tune in, though, all I can say is, don’t get your inner child’s hopes up. There’s lots of silly spy story action on display and plenty of vehicles flipping and exploding into fiery chunks. But this movie definitely won’t harken back to any favorite toy-box moments.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
