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I originally shot this off as a quick piece on Facebook, the sort I often post after watching an older show or movie. Since this is a relatively new movie, I thought I’d add it here instead. It’s not a conventional review, but more of a quick, informal impression.
I will literally, actually watch anything with Jason Momoa in it. So, of course, I had to watch The Wrecking Crew, now out on Prime.
Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa play half brothers James and Jonny Hale on a revenge quest to find their father’s killer: it’s an excellent pairing and makes you wonder why no one thought of it before. The end signals the vague possibility of a sequel — which needs to be stronger than this film. It’s not horrible, you won’t regret having watched it, and while action films like this one are inevitably clichéd, the best ones manage to infuse something new entirely — hard to do after decades of the genre, and a reason why the Mission Impossible films perform so well. Roger Moore’s review points to the unfortunate flaws in Wrecking Crew, including the predictable dialogue.1Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the overall amateurish and often oddly and overly positive nature of its reviews, the New York Times reviewed this movie in terms so glowing that even its makers might be embarrassed. It is hard to take this newspaper seriously these days.
This movie had real potential, given the two leads — and I liked seeing Bautista’s gravitas and deep intelligence; I dearly wish he could appear in these kinds of roles more often. He creates a stillness about him in key moments, and there’s a certain meta quality to the scenes where he’s facing off different antagonists who think he’s too stupid to see what they are up to (and since this is an action film, one such person ends up losing key portions of his anatomy for having underestimated the man.) Momoa is underrated as a comic actor. His Saturday Night Live appearance as a slightly gay Christmas spirit is a classic and here, he does things with his face, especially his eyebrows, and his hands that heighten the comic effect of some scenes. 2Edited from “slightly gay Santa,” to correct the error. Unfortunately, he struggles with some really bad dialogue foisted upon him. If there is to be a sequel, it should use these two men to better effect and allow them to shine as the actors they are instead of relying on their obvious physical characteristics and weak plot devices to carry the film.
One of the best aspects of this film is that it is unashamedly Hawaiian in its ethos — there’s lots of slang they don’t bother explaining, although it’s all pretty clear in context and I learnt, to my delight, a whole new word for “dick.” The concept of family is entirely different from what you see in anglo-driven films. It’s made clear that every older person is an uncle or aunty and at some point, you have to stop trying to distinguish between biological and chosen family.3To be clear, non-white family structures are also oppressive in their own way, although you would not know that if you read some of the many texts about how utterly perfect they are. There is, of course, the usual and somewhat tired part where someone is made to voice, in an entirely predictable way, dialogue about the spirit of Hawaii and all the rest. But it doesn’t last too long (I have a feeling some of that was cut out of the final version, and this was one of the better decisions because any more would have been unbearable.)
The soundtrack is extremely clumsy, and adds nothing that’s not obvious. RZA’s “Like a Drum” drones “I’m banging on your head like a drum” while Bautista’s character does exactly that to one of the villains. Phil Collins’s “Take Me Home” plays at the end, a little after Momoa talks to a photograph of his dead mother about coming home to Hawaii (this is not a spoiler — you can predict this in the first ten minutes).
Watch it on a Friday evening with a Guinness in hand and some jalapeno chips. You won’t remember much afterwards, and that won’t be the Guinness’s fault.
See also: Jason Momoa, Aquaman, and the Queer Art of Friendship
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