From the too-simple set-up of the initial crime—their private eye father, whom neither have spoken to in years, sends Jonny a package right before he’s run down by a van in the opening scene—The Wrecking Crew tries to stuff its plot with convolutions and runarounds, the kind of cluttering misdirection and ephemera that’s usually handwaved away by the cynical atmosphere and hangdog detectives of noir. Here, Jonny and James are the exact same kind of vanilla badass, bumbling through a mystery clear to everyone but them and where each new character slots easily into a predetermined screenplay type. There’s the local cop (Stephen Root), who serves as their surrogate Lethal Weapon captain. There’s the shady businessman (Claes Bang with a weebish topknot) and family-friend politician (Temuera Morrison), obviously in cahoots. There’s the comic-relief tech nerd (Jacob Batalon, who desperately needs to escape this typecasting) and the brothers’ wives/girlfriends (Morena Baccarin and Roimata Fox) who exist to alternately nag and fawn over the leads. Henchmen fodder is supplied by the Yakuza and the Hawaiian mob.
If this looks like a bullet list you scribble down the hour before a big presentation about your Momoa-Bautista team-up movie, that’s representative of what it feels like watching The Wrecking Crew. The duo muscle through swaths of story with a tone that is clear only in its aggression, interlacing crime cliches and left-field emotional melodrama with dick-swinging stupidity—a cheese-grater moment out of Evil Dead Rise and a teeth-scattering pseudo-curbstomp are matched by wit like “Fuck you, fat Jackie Chan!” and “Oh look, it’s fat John Cena.” It’s The Nice Guys if the script got a Spike TV rewrite and the leads had been replaced by two big bags of gas station beef jerky. The butt-rock score from Bobby Krlic is, at least, fitting.
Perhaps the most disappointing part of The Wrecking Crew is that both Momoa and Bautista have worked with and against type to charm before. Tropper’s script gestures towards self-awareness, with every other side character commenting on the leads’ undeniable dumb-jock aura. And yet, though they have every opportunity to rebel against this—and Bautista, at least, is ostensibly playing a by-the-book military man—they fall into the stereotype without over-embracing it. They’re playing stupid, but not stupid enough, and a too-similar kind of stupid to generate any kind of driving friction between them. Their bickering is toothless, and their approaches to investigating Hawaii’s underworld mostly involve highly telegraphed punching. Soto’s set pieces are similarly underwhelming—scenes of storming a compound and outrunning a helicopter are as derivative as yet another fight scene mimicking the Oldboy hallway.
The Hawaiian setting, dueling-brother premise, and egoless charisma of its leads (both Bautista and Momoa made their superhero characters into enjoyably dense scene-stealers, not to mention their abilities to get silly in kids’ movies) offered plenty to set The Wrecking Crew apart, both from its brainless-action contemporaries and its straight-to-streaming star vehicle peers. But outside of some local slang and sandy shooting locations, there’s little that’s memorable—even the rancid vibes and intangible action aren’t especially notable for a two-hander like this. It’s rarely the case where a film would actually be improved by leaning into its worst impulses, but if The Wrecking Crew had gone full tank-top cinema, it might have at least felt like its makers were having fun making a mess.
Director: Ángel Manuel Soto
Writer: Jonathan Tropper
Starring: Dave Bautista, Jason Momoa, Claes Bang, Temuera Morrison, Jacob Batalon, Frankie Adams, Miyavi, Stephen Root, Morena Baccarin, Lydia Peckham, Roimata Fox, Branscombe Richmond, Maia Kealoha, Josua Tuivavalagi
Release Date: January 28, 2026 (Amazon)
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