Movie Review – Wrecking Crew, The (2026)
Principal Cast : Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Claes Bang, Temuera Morrison, Jacob Batalon, Frankie Adams, Miyavi, Stephen Root, Morena Baccarin, Maia Kealoha, Lydia Peckham, Stephen Oyoung, Mark R Black, David Hekil Kenui Bell, Roimata Fox, Branscombe Richmond, Josua Tulvavalagi, Brian L Keaulana.
Synopsis: Estranged half-brothers Jonny and James reunite after their father’s mysterious death. As they search for the truth, buried secrets reveal a conspiracy threatening to tear their family apart.
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Built like the proverbial shithouse, Amazon’s brawny beefcake venture pairing two of cinema’s bulkiest modern action men, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, The Wrecking Crew is a loud, obnoxiously stupid actioner that rouses the primal urge to punch a wall and channels it into a cumbersome-yet-thin script and the requisite bombast designed to shift half a billion dollars’ worth of digital eyeballs. Only, because it’s Amazon, you’ll never see it on a screen bigger than the one you have at home, which is both a shame and a blessing. This is the kind of film that deserves either the largest screen possible, to fully engulf the audience in its absurdity, or the smallest one you can find, to minimise the creeping sensation that you’re getting dumber the longer it runs. The Wrecking Crew is exactly the kind of movie Jason Statham has been making solo for the better part of two decades: wanton violence, charismatic yet generic dialogue, faux emotional heft courtesy of innocent bystanders “caught in the crossfire”, and unrelenting attitude to spare. If only this one were better written, it might have been a minor genre classic.
The film follows estranged half-brothers Jonny Hale (Momoa), a volatile Oklahoma police detective, and James Hale (Bautista), a disciplined former US Navy SEAL turned drill instructor living in Hawaii, who are dragged back into each other’s orbit following the apparent hit-and-run death of their father, Walter Hale (Stephen Root), a hard-boiled private investigator. Reunited on Oahu, the brothers begin probing Walter’s final case, uncovering a widening conspiracy involving corrupt politicians, land developers and a Yakuza syndicate with vested interests in contested Hawaiian land. As their reluctant partnership deepens, Jonny and James are forced to navigate old resentments and buried family secrets while crossing paths with developer Marcus Robichaux (Claes Bang), Governor Peter Mahoe (Temuera Morrison), and allies including Walter’s assistant Pika (Jacob Batalon) and cousin Nani (Frankie Adams). What begins as a personal search for answers inevitably escalates into a violent, high-stakes reckoning that tests whether the brothers can trust each other long enough to expose the truth behind their father’s death.
It’s difficult to know where to begin with the many, many problems I had with The Wrecking Crew. From Jonathan Tropper’s (The Adam Project) risible screenplay, to Blue Beetle helmer Ángel Manuel Soto’s uneven direction, to Amazon’s MGM-branded production values that often look suspiciously like a good chunk of this was shot inside a volume, the film is a combustible amalgam of ripe testosterone, deliriously stupid action set-pieces, over-the-top violence and a borrowed, honourific, Hawaii-themed familial emotional core that feels shamelessly appropriated from the Fast & Furious saga. There isn’t an original idea to be found anywhere in its two-hour runtime, but I’ll be stuffed if I didn’t have an absolute blast watching Bautista and Momoa bicker and squabble their way through it like a Lethal Weapon film on cocaine and steroids.
Entirely self-aware, Bautista leans hard into his gruff leading-man persona, the dramatic actor in him still percolating beneath the explosions and gratuitous limb-rending, delivering heavy-set machismo with just enough sincerity to sell it. Momoa, meanwhile, essentially reconfigures his Aquaman schtick, dials up the anger to eleven, and lets his feral charisma do most of the heavy lifting. Neither actor is especially convincing playing angry, embittered half-brothers saddled with decades of unresolved trauma, but they accommodate the wafer-thin character arcs they’re given well enough. The supporting cast, meanwhile, often does more to prop up the film’s lackadaisical inner logic than either of the leads: Morena Baccarin appears in what feels like a repurposed clone of her Deadpool role; Jacob Batalon once again proves he is cinema’s most dependable sidekick; and Stephen Root hams it up gloriously as a local Hawaii police chief perpetually one step away from screaming at everyone to get out of his town.
As idiotic as much of the dialogue is, the film’s chief charm lies in watching Bautista and Momoa argue, posture and brawl their way through the onslaught of absurdity. Bautista delivers one of the film’s most obvious would-be catchphrase lines with bowel-trembling bass and steely-eyed glare, earning the kind of audience whoop this sort of movie lives for, while Momoa’s eternal teenage surfer-dude wit is maximised by the sheer amount of screen time he’s afforded. They trade barbs and blows both verbally and physically, and most of the film’s better moments come from this dynamic rather than anything related to the plot itself. And ah yes, the plot: a facile property-development under-narrative working overtime to keep Jonny and James from spending the entire film trying to kill each other. Claes Bang’s odious French developer villain is just stupid and forgettable enough to make us hiss and boo whenever he appears, but the story itself is a zephyr of nothingness, capably shouldered by its two leads firing metaphorical shots in every direction.
It feels like there have been remarkably few major action films set primarily in Hawaii in the modern blockbuster era, outside of the aforementioned Fast & Furious entries, and The Wrecking Crew does at least make an effort to maximise the island state’s landscapes and grounded locations. It also populates its supporting roles with Hawaiian and South Pacific actors, a welcome touch even when the material is thin. Notable here is David Hekili Kenui Bell, in his second and final feature film appearance as a henchman before his passing in 2025, and Lilo & Stitch’s Maia Kealoha, who appears as James’ young daughter Lani. Temuera Morrison transplants himself comfortably into the underwritten role of a corrupt Hawaiian politician, while Frankie Adams and Roimata Fox play sister-in-law and wife to Bautista’s James respectively, lending a sliver of authenticity to the film’s otherwise paint-by-numbers emotional beats.
Between the blockbusting dialogue, frantic action sequences and several transparent riffs on popular genre films of recent years (John Wick, Fast & Furious, Oldboy), Soto’s competent filmmaking frequently slips through his own fingers. There’s herky-jerky pacing and a strange imbalance between humour and brutality that produces a constant sense of tonal whiplash. One moment it’s a bone-crunching smackdown, the next it’s an undercooked family squabble with no real depth, as though chunks of the film were hastily rewritten or bolted on during production. When the action stays grounded, the film largely works: an absurd freeway chase involving a minivan, a helicopter and a pair of motorcycles is easily the high point, and arguably the best sequence in the entire movie; although, some of the VFX are embarrassingly obvious, shattering any suspension of disbelief and undercutting the commitment of both director and cast.
The final showdown between Robichaux, his obliviously idiotic henchmen (seriously, a dozen of them stand shoulder-to-shoulder and behave like complete imbeciles the moment shooting starts), and the Hale brothers is staged as a massive explosive climax, but it’s mostly a cobbled-together greatest-hits reel of tired action tropes. Aside from a handful of satisfyingly gnarly body-shredding kills, it’s routine rather than exceptional. A painfully clumsy denouement briefly flirts with the idea of a sequel before squashing it almost immediately, despite Momoa and Bautista very clearly having a ball playing off one another.
Ultimately, The Wrecking Crew is perfect January junk filmmaking: hardly intelligent, perpetually tortured by its own inadequacies, yet bulldozing through plot holes and contrivances with enough brute force to keep even the stupidest viewer entertained — and yes, that might include me. I can easily see how this kind of movie would both offend and thrill in equal measure. It’s a stupid, horrendously idiotic film in almost every respect, but the sparring between its charismatic leads is just funny and engaging enough to short-circuit critical thinking. An utter waste of everyone’s time, The Wrecking Crew is puerile nonsense that works often enough to scrape by as passable.
Who wrote this?
