The Wrecking Crew wrecked my expectations — Bautista and Momoa bring the heart

We haven’t known each other very long, my audience and I, but I’d like to think I’m beginning to earn your trust as a pretty good viewer with undeniably excellent taste, and there is one group that may eventually take issue with me: wrestling fans.

I’m just not a wrestling guy. I can appreciate the athleticism, the showmanship and the art form involved, but the WWE universe has never done much for me, and I haven’t really enjoyed watching wrestling since I was a kid in the ’80s, when Hulk Hogan was everywhere and professional wrestling felt less like a sport and more like Saturday morning cartoons brought to life.

And yet, one thing keeps happening that I can’t explain: wrestlers keep becoming actors I love.

There seems to be a formula to it. You have to be enormous enough that your mere presence in a normal room becomes slightly funny, completely believable as an action hero, and, most importantly, you have to understand comedy. Dwayne Johnson figured it out. John Cena absolutely figured it out, and Cena, in fact, has become one of my favorite comedic actors, which I still find bizarre considering the world he’s most famous for remains completely foreign to me.

Then there’s Dave Bautista.

I knew Bautista almost entirely from movies, mostly Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy and Duke Cody in Glass Onion, and those performances gave me a particular image of him that apparently had more to do with the characters he was playing than the guy playing them, because The Wrecking Crew completely changed the way I look at him.

Now, before somebody writes in to correct me, Jason Momoa was never a professional wrestler, but he certainly looks like he was created in the same laboratory, so I’m counting him spiritually for purposes of this argument.

That brings us to Prime Video’s The Wrecking Crew, which pairs Bautista and Momoa as estranged half-brothers James and Jonny Hale, brought back together in Hawaiʻi after their father’s death leads them into something much bigger. I had this sitting in my Watchlist for a long time because two gigantic movie stars beating people up together sounded fine, but not exactly like something I needed to race to the television for.

Then I finally watched it, and this thing rocked my socks off.

Let’s establish something first: I am not arguing that The Wrecking Crew is some towering masterpiece of cinema. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, with fights, explosions, gangsters, motorcycles, increasingly ridiculous situations and enough extremely graphic deaths that the squeamish should probably know what they’re getting into, but it also kept doing things I didn’t expect.

The biggest surprise was Hawaii itself.

I’ve seen countless movies set in Hawaii, and usually that means beaches, palm trees and establishing shots designed to remind you that everyone involved had a much nicer work trip than you did, but The Wrecking Crew actually feels interested in the people who live there. The movie spends real time inside Native Hawaiian culture, family relationships, community and the idea of ohana, and director Ángel Manuel Soto has discussed working with local crew and cultural practitioners because he didn’t want Hawaii functioning merely as an exotic backdrop.

The chemistry between Bautista and Momoa is what makes the whole thing work because these two genuinely feel like brothers. They irritate each other, compete, judge each other’s decisions and know exactly which buttons to push, but you also believe that when things go bad, each one would walk straight through a wall for the other, preferably after throwing three bad guys through it first.

That’s the movie: big action, big personalities, big laughs and a surprisingly big heart.

I had so much fun watching The Wrecking Crew that somewhere along the way I completely forgot I hadn’t particularly wanted to watch it in the first place, and that’s usually a pretty good sign.

If you’re looking for something quiet and contemplative, I can recommend plenty of other movies, but if you want a high-adrenaline action comedy with two ridiculously charismatic leads, some surprisingly thoughtful cultural material, genuine affection for its characters and more than a little gloriously excessive violence, put this one on.

Grab your favorite person, get comfortable and prepare to spend most of the movie somewhere between laughing and wondering exactly how much damage the human body is supposed to survive.

For me, this isn’t just a Watchlist recommendation.

WATCHLIST+: Absolutely.

And I’m giving it the big one.

THE KAZOO.

Not because The Wrecking Crew reinvented cinema, but because it surprised me. It took a movie I thought I already understood before watching it, gave me characters I actually cared about, showed me a world I hadn’t seen represented quite this way before, and remembered one of the simplest things movies sometimes forget:

This is supposed to be fun.

The Wrecking Crew is fun as heck, and sometimes that’s exactly what I want.