By: Kevan Maloney
Freelancer

“Monster Trucks” is a movie entirely undeserving of being on screen. Director Chris Wedge direct this $125 million budget movie but it felt like everyone taking part in the production of this movie just stopped caring halfway through. That isn’t to say that the premise is bad, I actually feel that it has potential to be a good movie but gets bogged down by its chosen style and target audience.

The actors made it abundantly clear that they had stopped caring about this movie. Because of this, the acting fell way below what a paying moviegoer has come to expect. Lucas Till, who played the part of Tripp, began by putting on a half decent performance but joined the ranks with the rest of uncaring actors by the end.

The acting wasn’t the only subpar piece in this movie. The CGI was atrocious and obvious, which is a shame considering that “Monster Trucks” relies on CGI to make up several characters.

The soundtrack wasn’t so bad, however, it did have the feel of a cheesy early 2000s Disney channel movie in the sense that It just pulled semi-popular songs from all different genres and threw them in at appropriate times in the movie.

The only part that I felt was decent was the storyline because it didn’t attempt to do anything extraordinary. The story was exceedingly predictable, you saw everything coming 10 minutes before it happened. It felt like they just cut and pasted some movie ideas from other movies.

All in all, I felt that this movie had the potential to be a good movie, but was put together so irresponsibly that all the good ideas fell apart. “Monster Trucks” just felt forced and poorly put together.

3.5/10
– The cast didn’t put as much effort into it as necessary
– The CGI underperformed
– The soundtrack felt ramshackle
+ The storyline wasn’t terrible

Contact the author at kmaloney15@wou.edu