The Wrecking Crew
Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto
★★★½
There is a specific kind of movie that gets made constantly and done well almost never. The pure, uncut, unapologetic action-comedy — the kind that Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. built their entire legacies on — never really went away. It just got cheaper, lazier, and increasingly difficult to tell apart. A streaming service drops one every few months and they evaporate by the weekend. You’ve seen them. You’ve forgotten them. The Wrecking Crew had absolutely no right to be as good as it is. And yet here we are.
This movie made me audibly laugh. It made me audibly gasp. I nearly woke up my two-year-old, which is the highest possible review I can give anything that streams after 9 PM on a Tuesday. Director Ángel Manuel Soto — who proved with Blue Beetle that he understands spectacle and heart aren’t mutually exclusive — leans fully into the absurdity of the premise without ever condescending to the audience. The result is a film that plays like it was made by people who genuinely love this genre, not just people who were assigned to it.
The chemistry between Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista is the engine that runs everything. They play estranged half-brothers — Jonny a suspended detective, James a disciplined Navy SEAL — thrown together by their father’s suspicious death in Hawaii, and their dynamic works precisely because they’re not doing the same thing. Momoa is chaos in human form, all loose energy and impulsive decisions, and he plays it with a warmth that keeps Jonny from ever being just a cartoon. Bautista, meanwhile, is doing something more controlled and considerably more interesting than the film probably requires. He carries James with a restrained gravity that grounds every scene around it. These two are not playing the same register, and that’s exactly what makes every exchange between them land. It’s the kind of chemistry you can’t engineer. It either exists or it doesn’t, and here it absolutely does.
About Bautista specifically: this is a conversation worth having. People who haven’t been paying attention still think of him as a wrestler who got lucky. Those of us who watched Blade Runner 2049 — where he delivered one of the most quietly devastating scenes in that entire film — or who noticed what he was doing in Spectre, know better. He is a legitimately good actor who works with his physicality rather than hiding behind it. The Wrecking Crew is not Blade Runner 2049. It’s not asking for that. But Bautista brings the same commitment to every frame regardless, and the film is measurably better for it.
Hawaii is practically a character itself — Soto shoots it with the same eye for authentic texture he brought to the streets of Gotham, and the action sequences feel spatially coherent and inventively staged in a way that streaming action rarely bothers to be. Jonathan Tropper’s script is lean and funny and doesn’t overstay any of its welcome. The supporting cast — Jacob Batalon, Morena Baccarin, Stephen Root — fills in the edges with exactly the right amount of color.
The Wrecking Crew is loud, self-aware, genuinely funny, and built around two performers who understand that doing this well is actually hard. It’s the most fun I’ve had watching action in a while. I want another one of these, and I want it soon.
