Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista’s The Wrecking Crew is the kind of buddy cop action-comedy a certain Fast & Furious spinoff wanted to be. The Wrecking Crew is Prime’s number one movie right now, with the film being a breezy and violent thriller about two half-brothers who reunite to solve their father’s murder.
The movie is an extended homage to the buddy actioners of the past, like the Lethal Weapon movie franchise or Tango & Cash. The Wrecking Crew’s ending even teases a sequel, so it could become a series of its own.
The Wrecking Crew Is The Retro Action Comedy That Hobbs & Shaw Tried To Be
Unlike many other streaming movies that claim to be throwbacks to the action movies of the past, The Wrecking Crew genuinely feels like one. It leans into its R-rating with lots of gore and salty language, while the fight sequences are quite brutal. The movie’s not-so-secret weapon is the strong chemistry between Momoa and Bautista.
The two trade barbed zingers throughout, but there’s also an effort made to give them a real brotherly bond. The Wrecking Crew also feels like a far more successful version of what the Fast & Furious offshoot Hobbs & Shaw was trying to do. That outing had plenty of one-liners, macho banter and explosions – but it all felt hollow.
Stars Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham land a few quips, but the film feels too clean and sanitized. The Wrecking Crew understands that the buddy movies of old hat worked were invested in their characters, and the action flowed from there. Hobbs & Shaw, on the other hand, treats the action as the main course.
Hobbs & Shaw’s Huge Budget Doomed It
It’s not totally fair to compare The Wrecking Crew to Hobbs & Shaw. The former has a way lower budget and was designed as an R-rated outing for streaming audiences. Hobbs & Shaw is part of a blockbuster franchise with major expectations behind it, so from the start, it had to play nice.
Its $200 million budget also meant no bad language and the violence can’t get too intense. Still, it can’t help but feel like the cleaned-up TV edit of a movie like Tango & Cash, rather than the successor to them. That’s not to say there can’t be an entertaining, PG-13 take on this formula – but Hobbs & Shaw certainly wasn’t it.
If Hobbs & Reyes Happens, It Could Learn A Lot From The Wrecking Crew
Johnson’s shock return in Fast X was setting up another spinoff dubbed Hobbs & Reyes, which would have pit Hobbs and Momoa’s villain against each other. The tepid response to that 2023 instalment has frozen the saga, however, so there’s a chance the spinoff (or even Fast 11) will never actually happen.
Assuming Hobbs & Reyes does rev ahead, it should borrow a few notes from The Wrecking Crew. It should set itself apart from the other Fast & Furious films and go full R, and put the focus on the core rivalry between its main characters, and less on expensive, noisy action sequences.
The Wrecking Crew’s action can be disappointingly CG-assisted in places, but the one-on-one bouts are still crunchy and visceral. It feels like Momoa’s time is better spent on a sequel to his Amazon Prime hit, but if he gets the call for Hobbs & Reyes, he would do well to bring the same formula to it.
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