Summary: A young man working at a small town junkyard discovers and befriends a creature which feeds on oil being sought by a fracking company.
Minor spoilers ahead.
Pros:
The Cast. Everyone in this movie is having fun. I don’t think the characters are anything special but everyone in it, does their thing, they’re having fun. Rob Lowe is in this movie, he’s essentially the villain. Thomas Lennon is also in this movie, as someone who works with Lowe’s character but feels bad for the creatures and turns to the good side. Lucas Till is Tripp Coley a high school senior, who loves cars and is working on restoring a truck. He comes into contact with one of the mysterious creatures and they essentially create a friendship in which the creature “Creech”. Jane Levy is Meredith, she is Tripp’s tutor and love interest. All of the characters are fine, serviceable for this type of movie.
The Friendship. It kind of reminded me in ways of How to Train Your Dragon in how Hiccup meets Toothless and they become friends. It was cute here too. Creech is this thing that loves oil and the way it protects Tripp, or reacts to him, it’s sweet.
Fun/Entertaining. It’s a harmless movie. It’s fun. The creatures are useful and though I don’t particularly like the design always, it was useful for what the movie needed them for. It had it’s really fun moments and it was cool seeing what they could do with the trucks. The creatures are definitely more fun and entertaining to watch than the humans and the CGI on them is pretty good.
Cons:
Bland Characters. So the acting is fine, but the characters are so one-dimensional that it’s impossible to care about any of them. The heroes are just “heroes”, there is also a random acceptance of romance between Tripp and Meredith. It’s clear she likes him but there is never any indication that he likes her and then later he just holds her hand, like in some romantic moment, and then later he’s like “oh no we’re not dating” and I’m like… what? lol. The villains are lame, Rob Lowe could be a good villain but he’s just the generic businessman bad guy. There is also this “mean guy” in the movie and he’s literally just there to provide his truck for the climax. They’re all just boring.
Basic/Cliche. This isn’t anything special in terms of the story. It’s the usual, bad guys are doing something bad, and they are getting in the way of where the nice creatures are. It always happens, and it happens here. Then of course they want to experiment on the creatures, kill them, whatever… it’s all the same.
Stupid Choices. I don’t know what was going on, but sometimes characters would do really stupid things, or things would just happen without any logical way as to how it happened, or WHY. Like, they needed two more monster trucks and they had to do more cosmetic work on them to make them useful and they had to do it in a night… and they accomplished all of this by magic. They’re all wizards.
Overall, Monster Trucks is mindless, entertaining fun. I don’t think there’s necessarily any harm in watching it, the cast is fine, the creatures are fun to watch and the CGI is good. The truck chase scenes are done pretty well and the friendship between Creech and Tripp is probably the strongest thing in the movie. But those things don’t help the fact that the characters make a lot of stupid choices, things happen, or turn out well because they’re all wizards. The story is very basic and cliché, there is nothing new happening here, and it’s not the best of those kind of stories. Lastly, the biggest sin is that all of the human characters are bland people. I didn’t care about any of them. That’s probably the worst, Creech is much more fun than the actual people on-screen. But the movie is a fun one time watch.
Rating: 2.89 out of 5 stars.
Have you seen Monster Trucks? What did you think about it? Did you have fun watching it?
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