Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, revisits a recent Francis Coppola movie that got a decidedly mixed reaction. Mike’s verdict? Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
THE WRECKING CREW
*** 1/2
I’m not a complicated man. I like simple pleasures, like butter on my corn and lollipops in my mouth and buddy cop movies even if they are done only half well, as long as they have explosions. That’s just me. That’s just something that I enjoy. Call me crazy.
A man is killed by a late night hit and run in Hawaii. It turns out that the man is a private detective and he had two sons, estranged stepbrothers, one who is a suspended cop from Oklahoma (Jonny) and one who is a Navy SEAL Commander stationed in Hawaii (James). It turns out that it wasn’t a hit and run as Yakuza hitmen show up at Jonny’s house looking for a package that the father sent. The brothers start to investigate.
Yeah, it’s a Prime Video buddy cop movie, so I did not have the highest expectations for it.
Boy, was I surprised.
The scriptwriting doesn’t rise above the generic — albeit, the high end of generic. What really sets this movie apart from the other slop that Prime puts forth is a dynamic interplay between the two leads, played with extreme fun by Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa as James and Jonny. Momoa is especially funny. Of course, there is the obligatory hand to hand fight between the brothers because, well, brothers fight. And it’s a great plot device to get the brothers to a level playing field, an understanding of each other, that allows them to solve the case.
Bautista is the serious guy and Momoa is the guy who plays it fast and loose, which bothers his half-brother to no end. But, as a team, they are hysterical. As one character puts it, they look like the “the Rock fucked himself and had twins.” They are determined to investigate their father’s murder regardless of whose pool they owe in and despite the admonition of the local homicide detective (well played by the always dependable Stephen Root).
You really don’t need a slide rule to figure out the ending of the movie but the fun is getting there. And it is easy going down. Unlike recent Prime movies such as G20, Play Dirty, The Pick-Up and Heads of State (I won’t include War of the Worlds because that was a commercial for Prime), this movie is actually a coherently concocted action film, even if some of the big action scenes look overly CGI’d. It’s also a bit overlong for this type of film, but it does have the Oldboy ripoff. I say “ripoff” because most of the viewers who watch this probably haven’t seen Oldboy, so they just stare and say “Kewl!”
It also doesn’t hurt that the supporting cast is absolute aces. Besides Stephen Root, there’s Morena Baccarin as Jonny’s girlfriend who has special skills, Jacob Batalan who was the father’s sometimes tech guy, Claes Bang as the evil criminal guy and Temuera Morrison as a family friend who happens to be the Governor of the Island.
The generic script by Jonathan Teopper has been suitably updated for its leads and is ably directed by Angel Manuel Soto, who gave us the very good DC superhero movie Blue Beetle.
What I liked about it ultimately is that it had no pretensions about what it is. It’s not a mystery; it’s not a noir – it is an action comedy and doesn’t even try to rise above its own limitations.
But by casting Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa in the leads, it kind of does.
I expect a sequel.
WATCH IT!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
