** THE WRECKING CREW. Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto. With Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Jacob Batalon, Cleas Bang, and more. Amazon Prime.
JORDAN OSMAN reviews
Amazon Prime’s first exclusive movie of the year: The Wrecking Crew (2026), is an action-comedy, buddy-cop romp set in Hawaii with big names, bigger explosions, and occasional racism.
The titular “crew” consists of two (and only two) semi-estranged half-brothers: James (Dave Bautista), and Jonny Hale (Jason Momoa), which is technically a crew in the same way that two buskers in a subway station is an orchestra. James is a gruff, no-nonsense Navy SEAL with the personality of an grumpy cinderblock, while Jonny is a roguish loose-cannon cop with a criminal past and a tendency to call Asian characters Jackie Chan.
After their father, Walter Hale (Brian Keaulana), is killed in a hit-and-run while working as a private investigator, the “crew” must put aside their differences and work together to uncover a deeper conspiracy on the island.
Despite a promising premise, the film stumbles around for a while with meandering subplots. The brothers (sorry, half-brothers) treat their father’s death like a teenager being faced with the tragic inconvenience of having to tidy their own room. And, like teenagers, they aggressively argue about past grievances without a shred of humour or levity. This grounded attitude of a pseudo-domestic drama conflicts with the film’s over-the-top action and cartoonishly evil villain; too often it takes itself too seriously to be fun.
Humour scrapes the barrel
The film’s action set pieces are decent but its ambitions seldom match its budget. Some punch-ups are anticlimactically resolved off-screen while an explosion-fuelled, Fast and Furious-inspired highway chase has some sketchy CGI.
One might expect the duo to have more concern for civilians being eviscerated by their fiery, vehicular escapades given the way their father was run over earlier, but that requires empathy which the film would call gay and for girls before throwing in an unnecessary racial epithet. The humour in this action-comedy scrapes the bottom of a barrel once filled with discarded playground insults; it might be considered offensive if it was capable of eliciting any kind of emotion at all. This is an eight-year-old’s idea of comedy, so what good would it be to point out its transgressions if it can’t spell transgressions without its mum silently sounding out the letters? It might be more prudent to confiscate its sugar and make it sit in the corner until it thinks up a joke that’s more than a banal observation about someone’s appearance.
Bombastic action
The Wrecking Crew would fail an aptitude test; it can’t decide on what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s an action movie, sometimes a drama, a detective thriller or even a road movie. However, despite some hiccups, the story is something out of a paperback thriller and is mildly intriguing once it eventually gets going. Bautista and Momoa are convincing tough guys who are more at home in the film’s bombastic action than its dragging drama.
This is probably not the film with which to justify your Prime subscription but if you need something to zone out to after a long day at work then you could do worse.
What: The Wrecking Crew
Where: Amazon Prime
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