In the same way that most modern English-language action films have ripped off John Wick in one way or another, the 1990s saw countless directors trying to emulate the pitch-perfect formula of the previous decade’s two most influential classics: Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. Die Hard offered a template used by everything from Under Siege to Speed, but Lethal Weapon offered a tougher model to crack because of Shane Black’s writing style. Unlike the buddy adventures of Golden Age Hollywood, Black’s films were riddled with black comedy and nastiness. Prime Video’s latest action flick The Wrecking Crew may have a screenplay that’s almost defiant in its stupidity, but it does have an attitude of defiance and reckless chaos. Considering that Black has become a parody of himself in the last decade by iterating on his old hits, The Wrecking Crew is a suitable replacement because it's such a back-to-basics endeavor.
A typical buddy-cop film would cast two actors who couldn’t be more different in the leads, such as Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, so it's The Wrecking Crew’s most notable creative decision that its leads have similar star personas. Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa began their careers being muscle-bound badasses before trying to be taken slightly more seriously by experimenting with science fiction and comedy; while they previously appeared in Dune together, they didn’t share any scenes. They’re cast as characters who are technically on the side of justice, but are underdogs because they’re operating somewhat independently.
Bautista stars as James Hale, a former US Navy Seal who’s found a quiet life with his family in Hawaii, where he works on a military contract. His estranged half-brother, Jonny (Momoa), reappears in his life following the death of their father, Walter, under mysterious circumstances. Jonny was living in Oklahoma with his girlfriend Valentina (Morena Baccarin), but she left him around the same time that he got suspended for unprofessional behavior. Walter’s death is the only thing that reconnects the brothers because of a traumatic incident when they were younger, which is later revealed in a clumsy manner. Jonny became a cop because he wanted to seek vengeance for the death of his mother, which was never solved; alternatively, James has been a reliable family man in response to the instability in their household growing up.
The splintered relationship may not be complex, but it's serviceable as a reason why these two characters are involved in each other’s lives. Despite claiming to not be responsible for a black sheep like Jonny, Dave feels guilty about not looking out for his younger brother; Jonny looks up to Dave, who basically raised him, even though he’s never admit it. 122 minutes is a demanding running time for a film that’s light on plot, but The Wrecking Crew made up for it with charming banter. Scenes of Jonny being re-integrated with a stable life by meeting Dave’s wife, Leilia (Roimata Fox), and their two children offer reason enough to care about them sticking together as a family. Given that Momoa and Bautista are no longer young leading men, it’s entertaining to see them slip back into the same brotherly arguments that they had decades prior. It’s a lot less charming to hear the same petty insults coming from Ryan Reynolds and John Krasinski.
The most Black-inspired components of The Wrecking Crew are its violence and humor, which are just un-sanitized enough to explain why the film might’ve been hard to sell as a theatrical release. The heroes take blows and get wounded, and there’s at least an acknowledgment of the significant collateral damage they cause. While Bautista and Momoa look like they can handle themselves in a fight, the film goes out of its way to show off the stunt work because it offers dimensionality to their characters; Dave fights with the precision of a trained military man, and Jonny’s a bare-knuckled brawler who’s gotten into drunken donnybrooks. Chases take place at inopportune moments, fights appear in the eye of civilians, and there’s a specific goal for each action scene beyond the need to be exciting every 10 minutes. One place where the film falters is in a final car chase that involves too much CGI, because the more intimate hand-to-hand combat battles are more compelling.
Jonny’s rapid-fire delivery of crude jokes and politically incorrect phrasing isn’t exhausting because the dialogue is fitted for his character. Momoa’s able to characterize Jonny as someone without a filter who’s developed an aptitude for rebellion. The film is also able to let Dave call him out whenever he gets too full of himself, as if to pre-empt any derision from the audience.
The film’s villains are typical corporate goons, but they represent the type of wealthy outsiders that’ve chewed apart local cultures in indigenous settlements like Hawaii. It may be more than a passing acknowledgement of the actors’ heritage (Momoa is Hawaiian, Bautista is half-Filipino). That the film makes its setting part of the story might seem like common sense, but it's disturbing how many contemporary films shoot in Atlanta or Toronto to double as New York.