Monster Trucks

Monster Trucks is an odd and ungainly movie that tries to combine the plot of a "boy and his creature" movie (think E.T.) with the off the wall automobile stunts of The Fast and the Furious.  It's an intriguing combo, but one that ultimately doesn't work.  The movie doesn't have enough wonder to work as the former, and isn't quite dumb enough in a fun way to work as the latter.  And I say this with full knowledge that the movie contains a scene where the young hero drives his pick up truck up the side of a building, because he has a giant squid-like monster living under the truck's hood.

This is one of those times where the story behind the movie is more interesting than the movie itself.  In fact, I can picture a documentary being made one day, where the director, producers, writer and actors (of which there are some talented ones here) shake their heads and laugh as they think back on the making of this film.  The movie supposedly started out as the idea of the four-year-old son of the head of Paramount Pictures at the time.  He saw franchise potential in his kid's idea, and envisioned a huge blockbuster built around mysterious monsters from deep underground who like to hide in the bodies of pick up trucks, and guzzle motor oil.  The movie was given an overly generous $125 million budget, and was filmed back in 2014 with the intention of it being a big summer release for the studio in the following year.  Obviously things did not go as planned.  The film did not receive the reception they were expecting from test audiences, and the movie was kicked around various release dates for two years or so, until it is just now finally seeing the light of day in the traditional studio dumping ground month of January.  Paramount has already announced that they plan to take a huge loss on this movie before it even came out.

But is the movie really that bad?  Well, it's not exactly a disaster.  It's surprisingly far too boring for that.  You sit there in silence watching it unfold with little investment, all the while wishing you could somehow have been there to see this movie take shape.  This is the kind of movie that would have been a lot more fun if it truly took advantage of its bizarre idea, and just ran with it.  Instead, we get the fairly basic story of a lonely high school student named Tripp.  He's played by Lucas Till from the X-Men films and the new MacGyver TV series, who was 24-years-old when this movie was made.  And he certainly looks it.  The first time we see him, the film gets a bad laugh, because we see him sitting on a school bus surrounded by actual teenagers and kids.  Seeing him trying to pass himself off as a bored and brooding teen who wants to leave his rural hometown and find adventure is a mental leap that the movie asks of us that I simply was not able to do.  Same goes for Jane Levy from Don't Breathe (who was about 25 when this made), who plays the shy and brainy girl at school who has a crush on Tripp, but looks like she should be applying for different companies right out of college.

Tripp lives in a quiet town that is basically run by an evil oil corporation. (Is there any other kind of oil corporation in the movies?) The head of the company (played by Rob Lowe) wants to drill for oil in a certain area, but the scientist who works for him (Thomas Lennon) warns him that there are signs that there might be life living underground.  They drill anyway, and sure enough, three massive creatures that kind of resemble a giant squid crossed with a whale shoot up out of the ground.  Two of the creatures are captured, while one of them manages to escape to the junkyard where Tripp works fixing cars for his kind boss (Danny Glover).  Tripp discovers the creature, and learns that not only does it rely on drinking motor oil to sustain itself, but that it likes to live in the body of his broken down pick up truck.  The creature's tentacles can produce electricity which gives energy to the car, and allows it to do incredible tricks and stunts.  Tripp bonds with the monster (which he rather unoriginally names "Creech" - short for "creature"), and decides to help it find its family and stop the evil oil company from drilling any further.

So, we have mysterious creatures from underground who can inhabit the bodies of cars and make them do things like drive up walls and take fantastic leaps off of mountains, as well as a sweet romance between Tripp and his girl.  We also have a distant stepfather for Tripp (Barry Pepper), who doesn't get along with him at first, but slowly warms up to the kid, a nerdy best friend for Tripp to talk to sometimes, and some bad guys who want to keep the identity of the creature a secret and lock it away.  All this, and it has an environmental message too!  The plot is an ungainly structure that seems to be made out of various things that have worked in past movies, but never quite come together here.  We don't sense any real connection or wonder in the relationship between Tripp and Creech, while the subplots concerning the young hero's personal life seem underdeveloped.

Monster Trucks would be considered contrived and calculated if it tried harder, but it barely makes the minimum effort.  Instead, all the emphasis seems to have gone into the special effects used to bring Creech and his family to life.  This is perhaps not surprising, as the film's director is Chris Wedge, whose background is in making CG animated movies. (He made the original Ice Age film back in 2002.) He seems a lot more comfortable working with the stuff that was added into the film later than he does the human actors.  It's not that he gets bad performances out of them, they just kind of fail to raise our interest.  It certainly doesn't help that certain actors like Lowe, Glover, Amy Ryan (who plays Tripp's mom) and Frank Whaley (Tripp's deadbeat birth father) are more or less cameos, and seem like they had most of their scenes left on the cutting room floor.  And when the big car stunts finally arrive, we can admire how they're done in a technical sense, but that's it.  There's no real rush, and we're simply watching trucks and cars smashing into each other and doing impossible things.

I doubt this will matter to really little kids, though, who this movie was obviously made for.  Young boys between the ages of six to ten will likely love it.  Anyone hitting the teens or older will likely find this as inconsequential as I did.  So, no, Monster Trucks is not as bad as you might think.  It's actually kind of boring, which might be even worse.

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