THE WRECKING CREW needed to do exactly one thing: let Momoa and Bautista be themselves in a buddy action comedy. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.
For about twenty minutes, it almost works. The opening has a loose, easygoing rhythm—clichés included—like the movie briefly knows what it is. Then something shifts. Simple setups get tangled. Key information gets withheld until the third act, not for suspense but because the script can't figure out when to say it. The early momentum disappears. What replaces it: scenes where characters tell each other things they already know purely so the audience can catch up. It’s storytelling that arrives breathless and scrambling, like trying to finish an assignment ten minutes before class starts.
That scramble becomes unavoidable near the end, when the movie stops pretending and just dumps the entire plot in one rushed conversation. Marcus Robichaux wants to build a casino resort in Hawaii—on Hawaiian Home Lands, no less. Gambling needs legalizing first. The governor's been bought for twelve million. Yakuza muscle gets imported for enforcement. The father dug up financial records through Robichaux's wife. A kid downloaded the dirty transactions. Torture happened. Murder followed. It's delivered at auction speed, frantic and graceless, as if someone suddenly remembered this information was supposed to matter.
The characters operate on the same convenience. James is positioned as hyper-competent—former SEAL, always three steps ahead, the kind of guy who reads a room before he enters it. Except he walks into a house where someone's missing and his kids are hiding, and doesn't register that anything's wrong until a phone call explains it to him. He also keeps an unlocked weapons stash in a house with children, not because it reflects who he is, but because the next scene needs firepower. His competence flickers on and off depending on what the plot requires in that exact moment.
The tone never settles on what kind of movie it wants to be. There's a scene where they infiltrate a party in Hawaiian shirts, played for pure cartoon logic—total farce. But everything around it insists on being taken seriously. People are dying, lives are unraveling, and yet we're supposed to accept both the goofy disguise routine and the weight of their murdered father. It wants HOBBS & SHAW’s irreverence one minute and genuine stakes the next, but keeps hedging between them instead of choosing.
What makes this more frustrating is how much raw material is sitting right there, unused. Jason Momoa has the kind of natural charisma where you’ll watch him do anything—here, he's playing Jonny like the fun brother who never quite grew up—but the movie barely lets him breathe. Dave Bautista is locked into restrained, responsible dad mode as James, and that could be a smart contrast, but their dynamic never gets enough space to build.
Meanwhile, their father—whose death is supposed to motivate everything—was apparently a terrible dad. Jonny even says something like “he wasn’t a father to anyone.” The movie still expects us to care about avenging him anyway, as if that detail doesn’t complicate things.
The ending plays out with that oddly detached FAST & FURIOUS casualness, where the movie just sort of stops. Big stakes dissolve in seconds, consequences vanish offscreen, and everyone wanders away like they’ve got other plans. After all the plot scrambling and the tonal mess, the finish feels indifferent—like even the movie ran out of patience for itself.
I watched THE WRECKING CREW twice, which is once more than necessary. The second viewing doesn't add clarity—it just makes the shortcuts sharper and more irritating. It's not a disaster. It's something more deflating: a movie that takes two actors who should have made this easy and turns it into a chore.
Final Verdict: 43 out of 100
