THE WRECKING CREW
Big Dumb Entertainment
The Wrecking Crew, on Prime, falls into the category of big bruiser actors embarking on an adventure, trading insults, and battling nameless, faceless bad guys who become more numerous as the movie continues. Think Hobbs and Shaw. The Wrecking Crew stars Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista as two estranged Hawaiian brothers brought together by the murder of their father. “It is described as a "throwback" buddy cop film with hyper-violence and comedic banter.” Once the brothers meet the insults fly. Many of them are very funny.
Bautista’s a Navy Seal in Hawaii. Momoa’s a cop whose girlfriend Valentina (Morena Baccarin) walks out on him. They haven’t seen each other in years. Momoa’s intro includes fighting off a horde of yakuza ransacking his house in the American West, avoiding swords and clubs, and tossing the bad guys around like beanbags. Excellent fight choreography. Unlike absurdities like Ballerina, you believe he could do it. Momoa flies to Hawaii. Brah greets him. Zinger after zinger. There’s something about two tough guys forced to team up that lends itself to comedy. Claes Bang, doing his best Russell Brand impersonation, is Robichaux, bad guy developer who plans to seize native Hawaiian land for his casino. He brings in the Yakuza to supplement his gang. You can’t have too many bad guys, and we’ll soon discover why. As if you haven’t guessed.
The cinematagrophy is great. Hawaii is beautiful. The demand for big set action pieces proves the movie’s undoing. As the brothers, Valentina, and funny sidekick (de rigeur) Pika are driving back to the house on a double-lane highway, a helicopter with a machine gun attacks. Two ninja on a motorcycle. Armed yakuza in other vehicles. A furious, lane-changing escape, everybody shooting. Valentina takes the wheel of the mini-van which curiously has a floor shifter to indicate her expertise as they weave in and out of flying vehicles and flaming wrecks. Here’s the problem. Scores lof innocent bystanders die during this sequence. You don’t seen them. You see the flying vehicles bursting into flame and exploding. Dozens of them. No mention of this carnage. The screenwriters never thought about it. All they thought about was bigger, better, faster, more explosive. If a story doesn’t take itself seriously, why should we?
Of course brudda battles brudda in an endless bone-crushing sequence that leaves them both exhausted and brings them together. Finally, the assault on Robichaux’ palatial mansion. First they have to shoot their way through 250,000 armed bodyguards. How many of these hapless shmucks are just contractors looking for steady work? Doesn’t matter. In this, The Wrecking Crew follows the same well-worn path of previous cavalacades of carnage including Nobody, A Working Man, The Beekeeper and countless others where a committee decides each subsequent battle must involve more antagonists until by the final scene, hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless assassins are parachuting in, climbing out of the sewers, or roaring up on motorcycles for the sole purpose of providing cannon fodder.
Contrast this with the brilliant The Night Manager, also on Prime, based on a John LeCarre novel. The Night Manager stars Tom Hiddleston as a British agent and Hugh Laurie as an international arms trader. Both are brilliant. The tension is almost unbearable. The first season takes place in 2019, mostly in the Middle East, where Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine infiltrates Richard Roper’s operation. The violence is limited but intense and credible.
Shout out to my pal Paul Bishop who writes about heist movies in Complications Always Ensue:
Fantastic breakdown of why spectacle can undermine its own stakes. The bystander carnage point actually highlights somehting deeper about the genre, when filmmakers treat bodies as props rather than consequences, the whole narrative contract with the audience gets cheapr. I noticed this same probem in John Wick 4 where they turned Rome into a shooting gallery but never acknowledged the cost. The Night Manager comparison lands perfectly becuase restraint builds actual tension.
Video games...I think they write those kind of stories like video games. NPCs don't matter, they just respawn. The damage doesn't matter, it just respawns. There is no reality, just pixels.