REVIEW: ‘The Wrecking Crew’ crumbles under its overloaded action nonsense
Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa star in The Wrecking Crew, directed by Angel Manuel Soto.
Somehow, a decade has gone by since Shane Black’s The Nice Guys came out, and we’re still left without the sequel that movie deserves. Both stars, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, were keen to make one, but no one in Hollywood has been willing to fund a follow-up after the movie was beaten by The Angry Birds Movie (of all things) on opening weekend. Apparently moviegoers were just a little bit more excited to see celebrity-voiced animated birds get chucked at animated pigs than they were to see a grungy, 1970s-era mystery comedy.
The Nice Guys is back on my mind, though, because of the release of another rough-and-tumble buddy detective movie that just hit Prime Video: The Wrecking Crew. Starring Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa, the movie taps into the same veins as The Nice Guys: a murder, corporate and government corruption, a colourful criminal underworld, and a pair of unlikely detectives trying to find clues while trying not to kill each other. In this case, the story is set in present-day Hawaii, and the movie takes pains to represent a Pacific Islander point of view (many of the cast are of native Hawaiian or Maori descent).
The main characters are clearly sketched, with Bautista playing James, an older Navy commander and former SEAL with a stable family, and Momoa playing his estranged half-brother Jonny, working as a loose cannon cop on an Indigenous reserve in Oklahoma. The hit-and-run death of their erstwhile P.I. father forces the two back together, and they realize that his shady business connections may have led to his murder. While dodging Japanese assassins and a slithery real estate mogul, James and Jonny need to learn how to work together and not blame each other for their dysfunctional family.
The two leads are engaging on screen and have some good chemistry together. Bautista in particular has spent the last few years of his career looking for opportunities to challenge himself with roles that balance dramatic heft with his undeniable tough-guy image. Momoa, meanwhile, is happy to coast with a version of his Aquaman character, knocking people around and guzzling as much Guinness as his brand ambassador deal can get him.
Alongside Guiness, Momoa works in another passion: motorcycles.
Superhero movie similarities aside, The Wrecking Crew is noticeably proud of its R rating. The curses flow freely, and some of the smaller fight scenes feature some gnarly violence (think an arm shredded by a cheese grater and a neck dragged along the broken edge of a window). But it’s in the larger action scenes where the movie begins to fall apart. Mid-way through, the main characters pile into a minivan and hop on the freeway, only to be pursued by a couple of Yakuza hitmen on a motorbike and mercenaries aboard a helicopter. The bad guys proceed to open fire on dozens of vehicles, killing scores of civilians. Jonny’s ex-girlfriend (Morena Baccarin), despite being a bank manager from Oklahoma, expertly drives the minivan like she regularly dodges guerrilla RPGs in Kandahar. Once they escape, the crew grab some take-out in their perforated van as if they weren’t just implicated in a national tragedy and aren’t being pursued by every cop in the state.
After that, the plot pushes the brothers toward a confrontation with the big bad (a snarky Claes Bang) and his goons, many of whom James and Jonny swiftly murder in cold blood (I have no idea how James keeps his Navy job after this). The movie also fits in a laboured tribute to the hallway fight from Oldboy that makes even less sense when you remember that James has a number of high-powered guns on him when he starts the scene.
As earnest as they may be, Momoa’s efforts to influence the movie’s product placement and setting starts to feel less like an invisible hand and more like a hammer. He’s not playing a character so much as he is embodying an grossly exaggerated version of himself, albeit one that takes pleasure in killing goons in increasingly creative ways.
You can see what the filmmakers were aiming for: a message about mending broken families in spite of long-held grievances, and promoting the native Hawaiian community instead of greedy land developers. But none of that really connects when the movie is so quick to throw away the logical, grounded qualities in the first act in favour of Fast & Furious or John Wick style setpieces, executed far more cheaply. Time will tell if Bautista and Momoa’s star power will attract enough viewers to Prime to prompt a sequel, given this film’s mild setup for one. As much as I like some of Bautista’s recent career moves, I’d much sooner support a Prime-funded Nice Guys follow-up (with him in it!). Someone has got to tempt Russell Crowe from doing all those European accents!
The Wrecking Crew gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Some of the VFX in the aforementioned highway scene are especially dodgy.
I did chuckle at some of the quips, like “fat Jackie Chan” and “You guys look like The Rock f*cked himself and had twins.”
If your state’s governor is getting arrested for corruption, do you send a lowly detective sergeant to cuff him?