My first movie from 2026. And because it was released in January, I’m not expecting much of The Wrecking Crew. The prestige movies come at the back end of the year, so as to be fresh in the minds of voters when awards season gets underway (roughly, November to February/March).
Not that The Wrecking Crew is the sort of film that is ever lined up for anything at all, except the appreciation of fans of movies like this. It’s Jason Momoa and Dave Baustista, before we go any further, playing a pair of estranged, muscley Hawaiian brothers thrown back together when their dad dies unexpectedly.
It turns out that Dad possessed something the yakuza wanted badly and has now died because of it. Can James (Bautista) and Jonny (Momoa) put their differences aside and etc etc etc.
You didn’t come for plot, why would you? Instead you expect big beefy guys doing big beefy stuff – fighting and getting each other in headlocks, kind of thing. “You guys look like the Rock fucked himself and had twins,” says one adversary at one point. The Wrecking Crew is knowing and good-natured, and it does this sort of reluctant-bro stuff well, at least early on, before its writer, Jonathan Tropper, starts repeating gags from earlier in the movie.
I like big, silly films like this and I like both Momoa and Bautista. Both have a gift for comedy, both give off the sense of being genial big guys rather than mountains of steroidal rage. They can handle a fight sequence, as you might expect from men who spent a fair bit of time in the wrestling ring early on, Momoa in high school, Bautista as a WWE star. Momoa gets a good one early on, wearing nothing but a towel. It’s close-quarters stuff influenced by that corridor fight in Oldboy (both versions), which returns as an action trope in the big-fight finish, when Jonny and James put differences aside to etc etc etc
This is a certain type of film for a certain type of person – someone who lives in Gen X World, if the soundtrack of Air Supply, ZZ Top, Phil Collins etc is anything to go by. There is a serious theme buried in the bonhomie, of global capital edging out local enterprise – Hawaii is being lined up as the next home of a gambling megahub – and a concern with ethnic identity. Are you a real Hawaiian is a question asked more than once. Momoa – mixed Hawaiian heritage – can make semi-convincing assertions in that direction, Bautista can make none whatsoever. Does it matter? Does it?
This is your Wednesday evening movie, to be watched while forking stuff into your face. It’s full of good looking people and there’s lots of action, a few dad jokes, a rake of people whose faces you’ll know (Temuera Morrison, Morena Baccarin, Claes Bang, Stephen Root) playing characters who are little more than placeholders filling the screen with a simulacrum of consequence until the fighting starts up again.
If you’re being picky, the yakuza are so stereotyped that the racism police might need calling, and though the set-up is fast and furious, funny and charming, things bog down in the central section – when development is meant to happen. But quite honestly do you really expect development, and if so why?
Perhaps the best thing about the film, the choreography of the fighting to one side, is its insistence on the importance of family. Jonny and James’s estrangement doesn’t just mean that they’ve missed out on each other, but they’ve been absentee uncles too. The sight of Jonny’s niece, Lani (Maia Kealoha) braiding his hair is meant to be amusing and touching, and it is. Though lots of innocent people die in this movie, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a warm beating heart here too.
The Wrecking Crew – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
