Summary
The Wrecking Crew is a much better movie than you probably expected, with Momoa and Bautista providing not just imposing physiques but also real class.
When I first heard tell of a straight-to-streaming action movie starring Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, I feared the worst. And it’s on Prime Video, no less, the recent home of one of the worst movies ever conceived. The fact that it’s called The Wrecking Crew just seemed like the icing on the cake. I figured I knew exactly what to expect. The biggest surprise of Angel Manuel Soto’s buddy-action throwback is that it isn’t content to deliver the bare minimum.
The second-biggest surprise is that it’s really good. I don’t just mean good for a knucklehead action movie; I mean good, full stop, full of well-orchestrated fight sequences, solid humour, and – get this – a real thematic undercurrent, sense of place, and proper acting. Soto, who is following Charm City Kings and Blue Beetle with this, is a half-decent filmmaker who, it turns out, is pretty damn good at all the things he needs to be good at to make the kind of movies he wants to make.
On paper, things are business as usual. James Hale (Bautista, Dune) is a former Navy SEAL turned stern drill instructor, who lives in picturesque Hawaii with his lovely but no-nonsense wife, Leila (Roimata Fox), and their two children. James is long estranged from his heavy-drinking wildcard half-brother, Jonny (Momoa, Aquaman), who is a cop on an Oklahoma reservation, introduced while breaking up with his fiery girlfriend, Valentina (Morena Baccarin, Sheriff Country), after forgetting her birthday.
Not long after, Jonny is attacked by Yakuza henchmen who believe his deadbeat private eye father, Walter, may have sent him something important enough to have gotten him killed in a hit-and-run. Still smarting from the death of his mother, which he failed to prevent, Jonny returns to Hawaii to find out who killed his dad, taking time on the way to reconnect with James and stumble headlong into a dangerous conspiracy involving local politics, the real estate mogul heir to a sugar fortune, and Japanese gangsters.
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But it works on multiple levels, some of them unexpected. There’s a laundry list of standard beats to hit – including chases, fistfights, and shootouts – that Soto nails with real skill, despite the occasional presence of distractingly wonky VFX. The comedy is sometimes so puerile that it can make the whole movie feel childish, but the script by Jonathan Tropper finds big laughs all over the place, including in the action set-pieces, which can sometimes take on a pleasingly slapstick quality. And we’re well-served on the villain front, with Marcus Robichaux (Claes Bang, Bad Sisters) providing a surplus of smug rich-guy energy, and his chief goon, Nakamura (Miyavi, Kate), striking a pleasingly demented figure.
But Momoa and Bautista carry The Wrecking Crew. They’re two guys who know what they look like but are earnestly trying to subvert the expectations that their giant physiques and generally on-brand – certainly in Momoa’s case – role choices tend to create. As ridiculous as both of them are in this movie, they do come across like human beings, and more importantly, like brothers. Both are united by what is quite clearly PTSD, which has manifested in different ways; James is painfully uptight, while Jonny is cartoonishly irresponsible and self-destructive. But when they meet in the middle, both men are capable of achieving a surprising amount of tenderness and authenticity, especially in the aftermath of a third-act punch-up that is indistinguishable from a therapy session.
At this stage of his career, Momoa seems to be primarily interested in projects set in Hawaii and that are respectful of the island’s culture and history. Apple TV+’s Chief of War is the obvious example, but there’s a strain of the same DNA in The Wrecking Crew, which was shot on location and is full of rich little details that help to constantly remind you of it. Temuera Morrison, who acted opposite Momoa in the aforementioned Chief of War, turns up here as Hawaii’s governor, Peter Mahoe, one of several Hawaiian actors involved. It isn’t preening and performative, but the attention to detail paid in this regard gives The Wrecking Crew a cultural texture that most buddy-actioners simply don’t have.
It’s good, in other words. It won’t change your life, of course, but as far as streaming action movies go, this is a distinguished variety, one unavoidably reminiscent of past classics, but that’s ultimately able to carve out a space all its own. For a Prime Video original, that’s a minor miracle. I’m still surprised it wasn’t advertising anything.
