Sometimes I worry that crafting the big dumb action movies of decades past has become something of a lost art. In my youth I reveled in the beautiful idiocy of movies like Commando and Rambo: First Blood Part II that managed to gain another layer of knowing humour when Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon hit the scene. From there, the 90s took over, giving the likes of John Woo and Michael Bay the resources to really blow shit up and while the casts got better and the budgets got bigger, the deliberate dumbassery of the action genre seemed to get gradually more embarrassed of its own legacy as the likes of Christopher Nolan, Paul Greengrass and Chistopher McQuarrie gave things a sense of respectability the latest Fast & Furious sequel couldn’t hope to match.
However, there are still some who remember the crazier days where public safety was at a minimum and heroes were swaggering meat heads who had a childish one liner for every situation and with The Wrecking Crew hitting Amazon with the velocity of a choke slam, it’s once more time to celebrate the ridiculous, foul-mouthed, violent, good old days, brah.
Hulking half-brothers James and Jonny Hale cannot stand each other due to their tumultuous youth. The older and more respectable of the two, James, is a US Navy SEAL who is based in his native Hawaii with his loving wife and kids – but in classic action movie fare, his brother Jonny is the complete opposite. A booze swilling, hog-riding, leather-jacketed cop based out of Oklahoma, he’s recently split with his girlfriend and is choosing to mark the occasion by drowing his sorrows. But after their estranged, private investigator father is mowed down in a very suspicious hit and run, three members of of the Yakuza pay the drunk Jonny a visit with brutal circumstances which only makes the death stink even more of foul play.
However, upon returning to Hawaii all investigations into the death of Walter Hale are put on pause when the past grievances of his sons wrupt once more in an orgy of childish bickering and out and out name calling. However, after finally (and gradually) starting to get on the same page, the Hales find that the closer to a conspiracy they get, the bigger the explosions tend to be as Walter’s assistant, Pika, soon clues them into just how big this thing is.
If there’s one thing the Hale Brothers do better than getting in each other’s faces, it’s getting in the faces of anyone who is dumb enough to fuck with their family – but with a metric ton of family trauma to wade through, will these two muscle bound mastodons manage to avoid killing each other first.
Explosions will bloom, cars will flip and a whole bunch of bad guys are destined to absorb just as many punchy insults as they will bullets or blunt force trauma. Prepare to say aloha to some pain, boys.
So, in case you haven’t already cottoned on, The Wrecking Crew is an incredibly dumb slice of action fare that seemingly only ever gets to fully shine on streaming services these days, probably because the copious swearing and spectacularly heavy-handed violence marks it out as a box office risk thanks to a harsh certification. But stripped free of a need to actually gets bums in seats at the local multiplex, the film is free to savagely ape the buddy movie stylings of the 80s while bringing in the sizable setpieces of the 90s with some (occasionally ropey) CGI of the present. However, what some may not realise is that it’s foul-mouthed, adolescent brutality and it’s apparent low IQ are not only deliberate, but also something of a virtue. In fact, the best way to describe The Wrecking Crew (a phrase that oddly no one seems to use in the movie) is if the Hawaiian flavour of Hobbs And Shaw collided in a motorcycle crash with Bad Boys and this is the managed, beast of a flick that crawled out of the wreckage.
Director Angel Manuel Soto – last seen calling shots on the brightly coloured Blue Beetle for DC – seems to want to get a piece of the Michael Bay-flavoured pie that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah managed to get with their vibrant, robust Bad Boys sequels. With a colour pallet that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Sesame Street and an array of even more colourful language to provide an unending stream of Shane Black-esque one liners (at one point the two leads are described as looking like the Rock fucked himself and had twins), anyone expecting a refined, rollercoaster experience will be shit out of luck – but I have to say I genuinely had a blast.
For a start, both the mountainous forms of Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa play expectedly to type with the former playing the more buttoned down, responsible, military/family man and the latter having a whale of a time playing the more rambunctious, shaggier sibling that’ll no doubt act like a warm up to his appearance as Lobo in the upcoming Supergirl. As a team, this duo of big and bigger mesh together well, bitching, teasing and brawling their way through the film, both sending up their tough-guy image to amusing effect. In fact, Momoa in particular seems to relish veering between unstoppable badass and grizzled clown that might not prove to be much of a stretch (he’s pretty played the exact same role in Fast X, Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom and The Minecraft Movie), but thankfully it’s still fun.
It’s also fun to watch the filmmakers put together some gargantuan action sequences that gleefully sees various do-badders meet some staggering messy ends, with an early fight between Jonny and a trio of Yakuza proving that Soto has an eye for bone crunching carnage with a humorous edge. Later still, he attempts to out-Michael Bay Michael Bay by staging a deranged sequence involving Momoa, Bautista, Morena Baccarin in another tough girlfriend mode and a eyebrow-freeJacob Batalon (he has alopecia in real life) tearing down a Hawaiian freeway while helicopters and ninja motorcyclists do their best to rapidly shorten their lifespan. Amusingly, said sequence must not only rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, but actually has to responsible for numerous deaths of the general public; yet The Wrecking Crew callously treats anyone not in the main cast list as NPCs which probably will either make of break the film with some people. However, when I say that I could feel this film aggressively grinding down my IQ, you have to understand that I class this as a major plus point because every now and then, you need your actioner to just be as aggressively crass, crude and obnoxious as it can just to exorcise a nice, healthy suspension of disbelief.
Loud, stupid and wonderfully garish, The Wrecking Crew happily joins the last two Bad Boys entries and Jason Statham’s gleefully ridiculous The Beekeeper at fully embracing ghastly violence and even more recoil-worthy jokes. If you fancy a little refinement with your explosions, you’ll find the film as classy as Two Girls One Cup (there’s a lot of dick jokes and one guys has his nipple piercings ripped out); yet, if you’re longing for an actioner with big, silly, hairy testicles, the duo of Momoa and Bautista has your hook up.
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