Boy, is this film Boring.
Whereas last week I suffered through Underworld: Blood Wars, this week's Monster trucks has come in to make me realize that no matter how hard you try, and how much money you invest, A Boring story is just a boring story...
Let’s start with the positive.
The filmmakers are competent here. You can tell a good bit of money was sunk into this project and nothing looks expressively bad, and nobody exclusively sucks. Everyone involved equally sucks across the board.
It's like someone force feeding you a story, and they laugh at all the jokes and cry at all the right points and smile at the aww, so cute moments. Meanwhile you’re sitting there uninterested, not laughing, not crying, and definitely not saying aww. I believe it's because one thing you can’t force, no matter how hard you try, is the soul of a film. It feels like everyone involved in this read a "How to" film book and followed all the rules beat by beat and then hoped for that big, big Hollywood paycheck
So, now with the bad....
The most forgettable aspect of the film is the score. I honestly can’t even remember it.
The direction wasn't terrible just extremely by the books. There isn't a single shot that seemed original or artistic in any sense of the word, The director coming from an animation background (Ice Age) must have some ounce of a creative eye since animation tends to employ great visual shots, but it is lost here whether he was incapable or lazy will never be known.
The editing of the film was also uninspired, nothing felt choppy, but it never felt engrossing.
The acting was terrible. Lucas Till plays a teenager that looks too old. There wasn’t a single ounce of believability as the characters portrayed were as 2 dimensional as Paper Mario (I love paper Mario btw) Jane Levy on the other hand at least tried to show some charisma but an actor can only act as good as the writing allows. The rest of the cast were meaningless as they were literally there for the beats of the plot to work. Which leads me to the biggest villain of this film...
This script is flat out terrible. It seems like the writer read how to save the cat (a how-to book on screenwriting) and followed every single rule to the tee, which I guess is fine if there was an ounce of creativity but there is none. Plot-holes and stupid check-mark moments litter this story
Run over cars for cool monster truck moment, check
Girl is interested in uninterested guy, check
Guy notices her right when he needs her most, check
Cute moments with the monsters to build some likeability, check
Angry stepfather doesn't understand stepson, check
Said stepfather grows a newfound respect when his help is needed, check
Every moment in this film feels like a forced written exercise...
So, in Ending...
3/10- Bad
Monster Trucks is a monster of a film in all the most negative ways. This is what happens when a studio exec watches his kid play with a toy car and thinks, how do I turn this into money? (True Story) I'm glad this movie failed because it has no right to succeed, no matter how much money rich, un-creative people throw at it. The film is flat, boring, and written so badly I could've sworn it was a writing exercise pulled from Hollywood's dump pile.
Did you see Monster Trucks? What did you think?? Leave comments below!
P.S I know I'm grammatically challenged so any corrections brought up is welcomed Thanks!