by Vi Burgess, Katerina Kountakis & June Jeong, editor-in-chief, section editor & opinions editor

When I first saw the trailer for “Monster Trucks” about seven months ago, it was so incredibly dumb that I thought some executive decided to make an entire movie just for the pun. Don’t get me wrong—the movie itself was objectively stupid, and the budget was ridiculous: a whopping $125 million. It’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever spent two hours and $4.75 laughing about, and that makes it totally worth it.

The plot is fairly simple, as it’s really a kids’ movie (we were the only people there between the ages of eight and forty). When attempting to drill an oil well, some engineers find a new ecosystem with (surprise!) monsters that prevent the drill from going deeper into the Earth. The monsters come up, wreak havoc on the drilling site, and escape; one of them ends up in Tripp’s (Lucas Till) truck, where he serves as the engine for a while. The power duo rocket around for a while until they discover that the engineering firm is about to wreck the ecosystem, in which they go on a heroic trip to save it.

The entire movie is basically a barely-pubescent boy’s dream–trucks, monsters, a high-speed car chase, oh my! It manages to fit every single Hollywood trope imaginable: daddy issues, a one-dimensional love interest (Jane Levy), a misunderstood creature, poor kid ridiculed by rich kid,  a dramatic fight scene, and a car chase. It’s everything that Hollywood could have possibly gotten repeated for the millionth time, all crammed together in one trainwreck of a movie, and it’s freaking hilarious. 

Perhaps because it’s aimed at children, the science and technology of the movie is laughably inaccurate, and the screenwriters apparently reveled in it. Every time something inconsistent and impossible came up, the characters managed to find a solution (lost phone? Let me, a girl who you’ve barely met, track it with my phone!) The occasional shout-outs to basic biology and physics had us just about dying with tears of laughter at the amount of research done (about five minutes of Wikipedia is my guess). And let’s not forget the irresponsibility of destroying high amounts of private property (and not paying for it), the gun violence (at kids), or the fact that they killed a man at the end of the movie (and completely didn’t care). Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s a movie for children, but it seems to me getting away with murder is stretching it a little, no matter what ‘side’ the man was on.   

In addition, every single word that came out of any character’s mouth was….stilted. It felt like the screenwriters had taken the most common line for each movie trope ever and stuck it in, with some weird transitions to make the plot seem logical. It may have made sense to an eight-year-old, but the number of really, really bad clichés just had us in stitches. Especially with the relationship with the lead character Tripp and his monster, Creech. Let’s be honest here. Tripp will never love Meredith the way he loves Creech. Meredith actually had no purpose to the movie besides serving as the bank account that Tripp needed to buy gasoline to feed Creech. Tripp acted indifferently towards Meredith’s presence, and it was so clear how desperately one-sided Meredith’s affections were…..till he suddenly and spontaneously decided near the end of the movie that she was his girlfriend. I guess every Hollywood movie these days just needs a pretty face to make the movie seem more enticing even though once you get up close and personal, the only thing you get out of the movie is the realization that you would have had the same amount of fun if you spent your time looking at dirt. 

Maybe the only redeemable part of the movie was the CGI. If I had to guess, most of the production budget just got blown on making really adorable monsters who elicited an ‘awww’ from the friend sitting next to me. Because the creature was incredibly detailed and appeared in the vast majority of the movie, it was immensely costly. They really pulled out the stops to make the animation incredible. In addition, Tripp was really cute—we got treated to a gratuitous shot of his butt when he was holding hands for the first time with his much-more-intelligent girlfriend.

Don’t go into this movie with anything more than expectations at about ankle-height. It’s incredibly cringey from start to finish, but that’s just what makes it absolutely hysterical.