The Wrecking Crew Review
Director: Ángel Manuel Soto
Date Created: 2026-01-29 02:18
2.5
The Wrecking Crew Review: Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto and written by Jonathan Tropper, this action-comedy thriller stars Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa in the lead, alongside Temuera Morrison, Roimata Fox, Frankie Adams, Claes Bang, Jacob Batalon and others. With a runtime of 122 minutes, the film positions itself as a high-energy blend of family drama, crime conspiracy, and explosive spectacle set against the lush backdrop of Hawai’i.
The Wrecking Crew Review
In Prime Video’s The Wrecking Crew, two estranged half-brothers are reunited following the mysterious death of their father. At first, it looks like he was hit by a car. Then things start to get really bad with the involvement of organised crime and people in the government doing bad things. There are also some people doing illegal things with land in Hawai’i.
The Wrecking Crew movie is easy to get into at first. The mystery about Walter’s death is really interesting. It pulls us in. The movie sets up the problem quickly. The story becomes even more interesting with James and Johnny’s complicated relationship with each other. The early scenes make us think that the movie is going to focus on the characters and their problems, rather than just a lot of action.
Jason Momoa’s Jonny is a guy who’s really messed up. He used to be a cop. He is still dealing with a lot of emotional baggage. Momoa does a job of playing Jonny with a lot of confidence and charm. After a while, it starts to feel like he is doing the same thing over and over again. When Jonny gets upset, he gets really loud. It does not feel like it is coming from a place, though. The movie relies heavily on Jason’s anger to show that Jonny is hurting.
The movie should have done a job of exploring what is going on with Jonny. Instead, it just has him yelling at people and making decisions. This makes Momoa’s Jonny feel annoying rather than interesting. It felt like the character needed depth, and the movie does not do justice to it.
Dave Bautista does a little better as James, the brother who is disciplined and restrained. Bautista is really quiet and down to earth, which helps balance out the things Momoa does. Dave on screen feels more real, and his scenes often feel more believable emotionally. However, the writing limits him. The relationship between the two brothers is what the movie should be really good at. It only kind of works when they fight; it feels like it needs to happen, but that also goes by too fast, and then they make up easily.
The film shows the brothers discussing their feelings; how angry, guilty, and abandoned they feel after years of never addressing those feelings. They only really have a few conversations that could be characterised as having any sort of meaningful value. The scenes of the brothers having these conversations take on an almost perfunctory feel. As though they are simply to move the plot along, and not to give either character a chance to express or convey any of the real emotions they should have been conveying.
The actor’s effort to portray emotion in these scenes is evident in their performances. As portrayed through the film’s story, there is not enough to make it believable. A lot of the movie revolves solely around the two brothers and their relationship, but they fail to deliver on that at all; the way the movie conveys the brothers’ story makes it feel fictional as opposed to realistic. That is a big problem.
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There are a number of smaller roles in the movie, played by actors like Temuera Morrison, Morena Baccarin, and Frankie Adams, but they do not add much to the story. They have solid performances; however, they were only necessary to help propel the narrative within the film. The movie’s bad guys are not all that interesting; they are just not as strong and menacing as they should be, and they come off as just like every other bad guy you see in Hollywood films. It’s hard to believe that these bad guys pose any real threat; they just seem to be there as plot devices. When this occurs, it diminishes the entire conspiracy element in the movie.
The Wrecking Crew’s tone is a jumble of action-comedy and dramatic scenes, forcing the actors to make split-second decisions about how to play scenes. It’s like watching actors in two separate movies as they try to figure out how to approach the multi-faceted script. It creates moments of comedy and drama during which the performances can be excellent, but also undermine each other due to the tone shift.
Despite the well-done action and chaos throughout the film, it leaves you feeling empty and unfulfilled at the end. Rather than excitement, there is a sense of predictability specially with the outcome of each fighting/shooting scene. The filmmakers spent all their creative energy showing “cool” (flashy) things occurring without any interest in what happens afterwards, so the violent scenes leave you with a sense of noise yet little value.
When you finally get to the end of the story, you feel more obligated to complete the movie (due to how long it has been) than you do for closure and growth to occur from the characters. While the performances provide some hints of character development, the film has not proven to you that the development has occurred, so you have no reason to believe it has. The final message about choosing peace over vengeance is meaningful in theory, yet it arrives too late and too quickly to leave a lasting impression.
Prime Video The Wrecking Crew Review: Summing Up
While the movie The Wrecking Crew has a decent cast and some moments where the actors have fun together, those positives do not help when the show has shallow characters, a predictable plot, and an uncertain tone. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista are both fine to look at, but the script fails them because it places more value on explosions than on emotional connection. There are moments when the film strives to have both emotional and thrilling content, but in the end, it delivers lacklustre entertainment value.
