A youthful mechanic changes truck racing for the stranger extraterrestrial, in Monster Trucks. Looking for any way to get away from the life and town he was born into, Tripp (Lucas Till), a high school senior and loner, builds a Monster Truck from bits and pieces of scrapped cars. After a freak accident at a nearby oil-drilling site displaces a strange and subterranean creature with a taste and a talent for speed, Tripp may have just found the key to getting out of his dead-end town and a most unlikely friend in a flexible alien who is able to bend and distort his body to fit into Tripp’s newest gas-fueled hog. Monster Trucks is directed by Chris Wedge, and is rated PG for action, peril, brief scary imagery, and some rude humor.

What kind of positive product can you design with 125 million dollars? Quite simply, a Masterpiece. When you look at some of the biggest action thrillers of the last few years, most of them don’t even come close to that ridiculous figure. So what does Monster Trucks have to restore our faith in the American dollar? It turns out not much at all. This is very much a wasted effort on nearly every end of the theatrical spectrum, despite a big name cast that somehow got roped into this charity project against their will. Could that be the answer to the big 125 million dollar question? Did Rob Lowe, Danny Glover or Barry Pepper make the biggest payday of their lives to sell their souls to a higher power? It would certainly justify the theory, because there’s very little positive or reaping reward to this laughably bad project that Chris Wedge has manifested. Monster Trucks feels like 90’s cheese at its piping hottest, and that predictable formula for subplots and animal co-stars that were the hit twenty years ago has managed to find a place again in modern cinema, despite waning interest in it. This was a movie that sat on the shelf for nearly four years after its production wrapped, and it’s clearly evident in nearly every area of the movie that can’t even hit a foul ball off of an underhanded pitch.

The cast is mind-blowing. I mentioned earlier about the trio of actors that got plucked from their respectable careers for something like this, and sadly the juice doesn’t justify the squeeze with any of them, because they are such a small part to this movie. One of the two positives that I had for this film is that it is a pretty solid, albeit terribly miscast ensemble, and there’s certainly some fun to be had for these actors figuratively hurling gas on the fire that was once their careers. When I think of miscasting, I think of actors who are in roles that they have no business being in. One fine example is Rob Lowe as a Southern accent oil tycoon who shows up when he wants to make a paycheck. Lowe is seriously in the movie for about ten total minutes, and the film decides to cast a new villain along the way because of his lack of involvement in the script. How about the other side of the conflict? Lucas Till (26) and Jane Levy (27) are the central protagonists for the movie. Both of them playing high-schoolers against a backdrop of young faces and children that had me laughing every time they cut to a school shot. Thankfully, the school is only shown twice in the movie, otherwise my laughter would’ve ruined a movie for a lot of people. To even try to suspend disbelief in thinking that these two are high-schoolers is absolutely unthinkable. I could see if Till’s character was a moron and maybe got held back ten years in a row, but his character is beyond intelligent with the things he does with automobiles. One of the tremendously awful lines of dialogue in the movie is Levy’s character reacting in shock, “Wow!! You are smart”. Levy looks like Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed. If this is feasible on this planet, then surely they could’ve cast Ellen Burstyn or Helen Mirren. Why not?

Then there’s the story. If there’s one positive that I have to say for this aspect, it’s that the movie does have personality. There were times where I forgot what I was watching and got some occurances where I could laugh AT the movie. This is still a negative of sorts because nobody likes their work to be laughed at, but the fact that I could get something out of a bad movie is what will always separate it from the worst of the worst. Other than this, there’s never a moment when you forget that this is a kids movie because implausible scenarios are everywhere. Lets forget for a moment that a monster who can barely move can command a car. Lets think more about the fact that he smashes through walls and cars by himself without any machine, then we are asked to believe that his siblings can be held prisoner by being stuffed in plastic hampers with very little structure or security. HUH? Lets follow that up by talking about how the trucks never fall apart despite jumping on buildings or off of mountains. Not to take away from the 90s aspect however, with a pointless subplot of a school bully who only shows up a few times to spout lines like “That truck looks like a truck took a dump……yeah, that’s what it looks like”. This kid isn’t a central antagonist or anything, it’s just to remind you that this is a high-school story even after you’ve already disbanded it as anything but. So what is the villain’s motivation you ask? Well it’s a big, bad oil company that has no motivation what so ever to see these monsters dead. They could just continue drilling oil and making a fortune, but the movie needs them to be bad and hunt these creatures down, so we can have some kind of conflict. I’ve got a headache.

I couldn’t possibly write this review though, without the visuals that scream 125 million dollars. The 3D is one of the most pointless additions that I have ever endured. There’s nothing of any eye-popping or visual beauty to justify its existence, so my theory is they added it to try to chip away at making back some more of that massive budget. This movie also has severe continuity constraints that proves even the production team couldn’t take this seriously. One fine example of the many is the introduction scene between Till’s character and the monster, where the latter is seconds away from being smashed by a junk yard grinder. The monster escapes, the grinder goes all the way down, and in the very next scene, the grinder is back up top to its starting position. Think that’s the kicker? think again. The next shot shows the grinder all the way down in crushing position paused, which means only a button press could launch it back up. What were they thinking? The CGI though, is perhaps my biggest flaw with the movie. I can give them a round of applause for at least rendering the color and shadow of the creatures accordingly to match the backdrops and human co-stars faithfully. It only took 125 million dollars, but what the hell. My problem is more about hit detection for these computer animated slugs. One thing that I like to do with CGI characters is see the reaction to the live action things they touch and interact with. Take the monster touching Till’s t-shirt, and how there’s no imprint or wrinkle to convey that it is being touched. Lets go bigger. Take the dirt surface of the junkyard when one of the tentacles of the monster is being dragged along it. Is there a line in the dirt to show his interaction? NO!!! of course not. Apparently this monster has no feel to it because its physicality is non existent amongst the things it touches. Treating kids like idiots since the early 20th century.

Monster Trucks isn’t the worst 90 minutes that I’ve spent over the last few months, but it does remind me why I shutter every time I think about January and the horrors that it beholds from effortless voids like this one. This monster clearly has no teeth to its material or production, and Wedge’s film was better left in the 2014 closet where it belonged, free from destroying the careers of Till and Levy who could do better work in their sleep. But as far as spending goes, Monster Trucks is a far better way to burn through 125 million dollars than say giving to a charity or building something great. I found thirty of it, but were still looking for the other ninety-five.

3/10