With TV hits like Reacher, Jack Ryan, and The Terminal List, Prime Video has become the preeminent streaming destination for “dad TV,” and that reputation extends to its original feature-film line-up, whose recent action-oriented blockbusters G20 and Heads of State were tailor-made for the male moviegoing demographic.
The platform’s latest film, The Wrecking Crew (streaming Jan. 28), is a kindred spirit to those predecessors, pairing renowned macho men Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista in an over-the-top affair that adheres to every ‘80s and ‘90s cliché imaginable. Never quite as funny as it wants to be, but making up for that in the violence department, it’s a healthy serving of slam-bang cinematic comfort food.
Momoa and Bautista don’t look like each other, but their larger-than-life burliness—even with the latter’s relatively svelte new physique—makes them a well-matched duo. They bicker and brawl with enthusiasm in The Wrecking Crew, whose story revolves around Walter, a private eye whose hit-and-run death during the film’s maiden scene is iffy on its own, and intensely suspicious given that it occurs immediately after he mailed a package while behaving as if he were being pursued.
When news of Walter’s death reaches his son James (Bautista) in Hawaii, the ex-Navy SEAL-turned-military instructor is stunned and saddened. What he isn’t, however, is motivated to inform his estranged brother Jonny (Momoa), who works as a cop on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma and is currently dealing with being dumped by his girlfriend Valentina (Morena Baccarin).
It’s up to James’ wife to tell Jonny that his dad is dead, and though he’s not too broken up about this bombshell, he becomes motivated to investigate it after being visited at his home by yakuza hitmen who accost him as he relieves himself in the bathroom.
The fight that ensues is an early highlight of The Wrecking Crew, with Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto staging the throwdown with maximum brutality, complete with Momoa hurling his adversaries through walls, windows, and toilets with his manhood flapping in the wind and a beer perpetually in his hand.
Momoa’s cocky bravado gives this sequence its personality, and that continues to be true once he arrives in his native Hawaii and begins quarreling with his sibling, who’s reluctant to believe that Walter was the victim of murder most foul.
Through their constant arguing, The Wrecking Crew establishes its protagonists as half-siblings whose dad was something of a two-timing lout, and Jonny as a grief-stricken rage-a-holic due to his mother’s unsolved slaying. Betrayal and abandonment issues are at the core of their problems with one another, and they aren’t easily alleviated as they endeavor to determine if Walter was assassinated.
Jonny checks in with the leader of the Syndicate, a Hawaiian crime gang at odds with the yakuza, who denies having played a role in the killing of Jonny’s mother and doles out threats that are quickly ignored. Concurrently, James snoops about the crime scene before heading to Walter’s apartment, where he finds Jonny and Pika (Jacob Batalon), their father’s former assistant, who curses a lot and doesn’t take kindly to the broken nose he’s received from Momoa’s ne’er-do-well officer.
Clandestine blueprints for a casino help Jonny and James get on the same page, albeit tenuously, and The Wrecking Crewis most confident when Momoa and Bautista are kicking ass and calling each other names, as during a confrontation that concludes with James’ beloved truck in ruins.
Jonathan Tropper’s script fails to strike a wholly steady balance between bloodshed and humor, with the former getting the lion’s share of attention; despite a few choice one-liners and insults, some of them involving shout-outs to genre mates Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, the film is somewhat short on dudebro punchlines.
Instead, its focus is on its headliners smashing, bashing, and crashing into everything in sight, including each other in a police station parking lot skirmish that marks them as aggro equals.
The Wrecking Crew’s centerpiece is a prolonged clash between James, Jonny, Pika, and Valentina in a minivan, and a horde of yakuza on motorcycles and in a helicopter, and though its green-screen effects are difficult to ignore—a shortcoming that plagues numerous streaming movies, suggesting that these cost-cutting maneuvers invariably produce subpar results—it exudes a giddy enthusiasm for R-rated mayhem.
Soto conducts his rock ‘em, sock ‘em material with sturdy efficiency and flair. Smarter still, he doesn’t lose sight of his leads, whose confrontational chemistry is more entertaining than any of the plot’s particulars, most of which have to do with French developer Marcus Robichaux (Claes Bang), who had hired Walter to snoop on his wife, and whose wife had hired the gumshoe to snoop on him.
Bang’s wealthy capitalist is a villain cut from a creaky mold, and his relationship to the yakuza isn’t properly explicated. That’s of no consequence, thankfully, since The Wrecking Crew is predominantly concerned with putting Momoa and Bautista through the punchy paces. As expected, they’re quite good at beating baddies to a pulp, and they prove just as competent during quieter moments in which Jonny and James open up to each other about their inadequacies. Those scenes, however, are so solemn that they don’t tonally fit in with the rest of the proceedings, and it’s a relief when the film stops being serious and resumes being vicious.
Tropper’s tale leans into buddy-cop conventions, as with Stephen Root’s barking-mad detective, and it’s peppered with notions of heritage, loyalty, betrayal, trauma, and family, not least of which because Bang’s interloper intends to exploit native land for his own profit.
Yet that seasoning doesn’t interfere with the main course of Momoa and Bautista doing horrific things to their adversaries with the aid of guns, blades, a cheese grater, and the edge of a kitchen table. Piling on the concussive chaos, Soto never gets distracted from his core mission of letting his superhero-sized stars strut their muscular stuff, and even more derivative touches—namely, an Oldboy-style one-against-many hallway scrap—still benefit from no-holds-barred ferocity.
The Wrecking Crew is the type of solid action flick that used to have a home in multiplexes. Those days may be gone, but it’s nice to know that, with Prime Video picking up the action-extravaganza slack, such rugged, no-frills affairs aren’t yet on the brink of extinction.
