Quick Synopsis: Two estranged brothers are reunited after the death of their father. Surprisingly, this isn’t a movie from the 80s.

Thoughts going in: I fully expect this to be terrible.

I’m not sure I trust Amazon’s original movies anymore. Yes, they’ve made some good stuff, but they also gave us War Of The Worlds, which I’m pretty sure counts as a human rights violation. And as much as I love Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa, I do question their choices sometimes when it comes to what movies they want to be in. Plus, The Wrecking Crew was written by Jonathon Tropper, who also wrote The Adam Project, which I felt was kind of underwhelming compared to its potential.

So it’s a surprise to me that I didn’t dislike this. As a whole, it’s a fun buddy action movie, with some interesting action scenes and creative choices. That’s a whole, taken scene by scene, there are some weird choices. The script definitely could have used an editor to tie up some small things. The whole “Character says they won’t do something, smash cut to them doing the thing” thing, can we stop that? It’s up there with ending a film with “here we go again” as jokes which are so overplayed they’re almost parody at this point. At one point, Momoa’s character says he’s going after his father’s killer so hard because he feels guilty that he couldn’t catch the person who killed his mother. That’s not so much a revelation as much as it is “pretty much exactly what another character said early in the film”. Can you imagine if The Dark Knight movies had a scene where Alfred told Bruce “you only do this because you’re in pain due to the death of your parents, and you’re weird”, then after a lot of character development, Bruce sat down and told Alfred “I only do this because I’m in pain due to the death of my parents”. You’d expect Alfred to reply, “I know, I’m the one who told you that. Also, you forgot to say you’re weird”. I get the reason for it (I think), it’s him admitting it to himself, but it still comes off as too “written”.

How about the action scenes? They’re mostly fine, but they do seem to happen around people. There’s one set on a busy road, which involves multiple cars crashing, people in helicopters firing at the road, etc. None of the other cars seemed to react. They don’t speed up or take the nearest exits to escape, etc., and there are no signs of panic. It’s like they know there’s no focus on them, so they’re safe.

“Did you at least call your brother in Oklahoma?” feels like clunky exposition. There must have been a better way to tell us the geographical distance between them. I dunno, maybe it was the delivery that made it feel fake, but I doubt that because the performers in here are all pretty damn good. But there are odd choices made in terms of casting. It’s weird they had Danish and New Zealand performers, and had them play English people, especially with the surname “Robichaux”. Just have them do their natural accents, right? At least, I think they’re English. They have English accents, but a character does refer to the male as a “French fuck”. Now he could just be being an idiot, but still. On the upside regarding casting: Miyavi oozes star quality. He doesn’t give the greatest performance, but he has a definite aura about him. I know next to nothing about Japanese music, but I could tell he was somebody just by the way he carries himself. He’d make a great Bond villain.

Really, The Wrecking Crew depends on the chemistry between the two leads, and they have it. I’d love to see them work together again. Without them, this would be a cheap B-movie, but with them? It’s a solid A-. The greatest compliment I can give this is that with a few tweaks here and there, it would feel like a cinema movie. It’s not perfect, but it’s competent and fun enough that it’s hard to dislike. Not a guaranteed watch, not even a recommended watch, but you could do a lot worse.