The Wrecking Crew, 2026.

Directed by Angel Manuel Soto.

Starring Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Claes Bang, Temuera Morrison, Jacob Batalon, Frankie Adams, Miyavi, Stephen Root, Morena Baccarin, Lydia Peckham, Roimata Fox, Branscombe Richmond, Maia Kealoha, David Hekili Kenui Bell, and Mike Edward.

SYNOPSIS:

Estranged half-brothers Jonny and James reunite after their father’s mysterious death. As they search for the truth, buried secrets reveal a conspiracy threatening to tear their family apart.

At one point, foul-mouthed computer hacker sidekick Pika (Jacob Batalon) remarks that the leads, played by Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa, look like The Rock screwed himself and had twins. This lazy attempt at a joke is wild for several reasons: for starters, and this is said with no disrespect, it would make more sense directed at Jacob Batalon himself. It is also only one of several oddly placed jokes about past WWE legends. Moreover, the terrible insult feels more like director Angel Manuel Soto’s equally uninspired casting reasoning, as if he were saying to himself, “those guys look alike, let’s make a vulgar buddy action-comedy set in Hawaii using that.” 

I have put more thought into making sense of that joke than anyone did while making The Wrecking Crew. Everything about the film (written by Jonathan Tropper) seems to have begun and certainly never evolved from that already simplistic idea that, while admittedly novel, is nowhere near enough to sustain 2 hours of generic plotting, CGI sludge, and the occasional satisfying fight scene.

James (Bautista) and Jonny (Momoa) are estranged half-brothers, with the suspicious death of their father paving the way to a series of events that call the latter home to Hawaii, a place he abandoned following being unable to solve his mom’s murder, currently residing in Oklahoma, and fighting with his on-and-off partner, Valentina (Morena Baccarin). Meanwhile, the former leads a traditional, idyllic family life while serving as a strict military commander training water cadets.

What more is to say that they incessantly bicker while finding themselves pushed into a rabbit hole of corruption involving the impending building of a casino on heritage land, Yakuza gangster reinforcements that want them dead, and the shady dealings between notable high-power figures here. Their only clue is a USB drive entrusted to Jonny and some files their father was trying to have Pika hack before his mysterious death, raising more questions than answers that the police department doesn’t seem too interested in looking into. Apparently, the crime occurred in a dead zone, out of range of all traffic cams and security footage.

Mismatched with James as the calm and reasonable one who wants to lay low, and Jonny as the angry loose cannon who, while never close to his father, feels as if he is obligated to solve what happened as a form of redemption for never finding cathartic justice over his mom’s murder. This also means that most of the humor is bestowed upon Jonny, who does everything from trying to sword fight with his genitalia to making endless heavyset jokes about Pika to blatantly racist gestures mocking Asian culture and famous celebrities such as Jackie Chan. When the character momentarily acknowledges and apologizes for saying something racist, it comes across as hollow, since the filmmakers clearly intend for it to land with audiences as funny. Nearly all of the jokes here are lazy more than anything, which is not helped by a grating performance from Jason Momoa, who is starting to play the same character in every movie now.

Across this unwieldy 2-hour running time that trudges through predictable plotting are a couple of bright spots. Namely, the chemistry between Dave Batista and Jason Momoa is amusing and even leads to a crowd-pleasing physical fight between them, sorting out their issues the good old-fashioned way. And while some of the car chases and more chaotic action sequences are filled with ghastly visual effects, the smaller-scale melee fights are mildly ambitious, at one point trying to re-create the beloved hallway battle from Oldboy, albeit with considerably less energy and bodies. The Hawaii setting is also a pleasant reprieve from the usual Los Angeles/Boston/New York familiarity. Mostly, though, all The Wrecking Crew does is repeatedly damage itself, destined to be another forgotten big-budget waste of algorithmic streaming space.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Last summer, it was such a treat to see The Naked Gun in theaters and laugh with giddy abandon. How rare that is these days, when most comedy is relegated to meme churn or, I guess, snarky asides in blockbuster spectaculars. An honest to goodness comedy, with no mission beyond making its audience guffaw, felt like a gift from on high. I worried we’d get nothing else like it for a long time, if ever. (I mean, I suppose there was Anaconda.) 

Thank god, then, for David Wain and Ken Marino, the longtime comedy allies who have made wonderfully absurd things together since the 1990s. They have a new film, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, that is proudly stupid, a scattershot, oddball comedy that makes the friendly, generous offer of simple amusement. Gail Daughtry isn’t on a par with Wain’s true masterpiece, Wet Hot American Summer, but it is still welcomely recognizable as one of his singular creations. Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not. 

For some reason, Gail Daughtry is a Wizard of Oz homage — though, don’t worry, there’s nary a wheezy Wicked joke to be found in the whole picture. Zoey Deutch, bright and chipper with a glint of something darker in her eyes, plays the titular Kansan, a high-school cheerleader turned hairdresser who has just gotten engaged to her former football captain boyfriend. All is well in their sunshiny little life, in their cute little town, until Gail’s fiancé quite suddenly makes good on his “celebrity sex pass” — an agreement that, supposedly, many couples have. (You know the concept: a monogamous couple’s compact that each party may sleep with one famous crush, with impunity, should the improbable opportunity arise.) We do, in fact, meet the celebrity in question, but I won’t spoil who that is here. 

This sends Gail into something of a tailspin, and prompts her to take a trip to Los Angeles with her queer bestie, Otto (a winning Miles Gutierrez-Riley), where she ultimately decides that she’ll need to bed her celebrity pass — nice Midwestern boy Jon Hamm, of course — in order to balance the scales. And thus a wacky yellow brick road adventure begins, Gail and Otto (which might be an anagram for something…) picking up a few new friends along the way. There’s a scarecrow-ish CAA assistant (Ben Wang), a not-so-heartless paparazzo (Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. It’s a game ensemble, all grooving on the peculiar and erratic rhythms of Wain’s (and Marino’s) comic sensibility. 

Jokes abound in Gail Daughtry, some short bursts of profanity and non sequitur, others more cerebral and longform. (Though, not that cerebral, really.) The gags fly fast and furious enough that it doesn’t really matter that plenty of them miss. At a Sundance full of depressingly unfunny comedies, Gail Daughtry seems practically Mark Twain Prize-worthy in comparison. 

Explaining any of the good stuff in detail would kind of kill the surprise, but I’ll say in broad overview that there’s a great hotel concierge bit, a riotously repetitive sequence of simple slapstick, a fugue of clever wordplay about the Wright Brothers (of all people). There’s cartoonish violence, over-the-top sex, and some inside-baseball Hollywood stuff that’s not too insidery, or too baseball-y.

The film certainly sags in places, stretches where Wain and Marino could have tightened up the timing, or simply added more jokes. But the overall effect of Gail Daughtry is to re-create the happily zonked university afternoons during which so many fans of my generation steeped ourselves in the elegant inanity of Wain’s output. (Wet Hot was something of a holy grail on my college campus, as it was no doubt on many others.) It’s a kick to have this particular vibe return to us after so long; it’s the first Wain film of its kind in over a decade, though of course there were the Wet Hot miniseries to tide us over. 

The film was clearly made on the cheap (though, it was done so in actual Los Angeles, which is commendable!) and the humor is not exactly the most broadly accessible. Thus, I don’t really know what its commercial viability might be, even on streaming. But I hope that Gail Daughtry finds its eager audience, and that those viewers then begin to clamor for more such movies, the kind that dare to go for a laugh without trying to reassure us of their hip, irony-vetted intelligence. Y’know, good old-fashioned comedies that aim for the gut while, yes, lightly tickling the mind. It’s high time to get dumb again — at least at the movies.

Another World, 2025. 

Directed by Tommy NG Kai Chung.

Featuring the voices of Chung Suet-ying, Christy Choi Hiu-Tung, Louis Cheung, Kay Tse, and Will Or Wai-Lam.

SYNOPSIS: 

Gudo, a spirit tasked with guiding souls to their next life, encounters Yuri, a girl whose pent-up anger threatens to turn her into a monster, causing a dangerous imbalance in the universe.

Cinema is all about stepping into another world, but few will match the kind of unbridled creativity and imagination bursting forth from Tommy Kai Chung Ng’s beautifully macabre metaphysical animated epic.

What lies beyond our time on this Earth has preoccupied filmmakers for generations. From The Tree of Life to Disney Pixar’s Soul, and Beetlejuice, the unknown has been brought to life on the big screen ad infinitum. In adapting Naka Saijo’s graphic novel Sennenki: Thousand-Year Journey of an Oni, the debutant director has not only delivered one of the first animated feature films to come out of Hong Kong in over two decades, but Another World should sit comfortably alongside the likes of Ghibli’s Grave of Fireflies in the way it deals with themes of loss and death.

The complexities of this world are broken down into quite a simple set of rules for the film to follow. When someone dies, before they are reincarnated, their souls are escorted through a magical realm known as Another World. Assigned a spirit guide, these transient souls shed the memories of their life, before being ushered through a waterfall to begin their new existence, leaving behind only a piece of string, knotted with the unresolved issues of their existence.

Our glimpse into this world of unlimited string focuses on a spirit named Gudo, who is guiding a young girl named Yuri to her next life, when he quickly becomes intrigued by her human emotions and the insistence that she finds her missing brother. This sends the two of them on an afterlife-encompassing adventure that spans an eternity and more.

With the visual world-building required for such a creatively vibrant landscape, coupled with the ambition of the multi-stranded plot, there’s an initial worry that there may be an imbalance between the two during Another World’s opening salvo. However, twenty minutes into the time-jumps and laying out of the lore of this new world, each vignette feels so seamlessly stitched together and in such a meticulous fashion that it leaves you in awe of the storytelling behind it.

It would have been so easy for the filmmakers to allow the exquisite animation to carry a half-hearted plot forward, but the two elements work in tandem to deliver some breathtaking sequences that also land with an emotional heft.

A death-bed confessional, the heartbreaking fate of a family trapped on a rickety bridge, a scene in a wheat-barn that’s as devastating as the Game of Thrones ‘Red Wedding’, and the horror (oh the horror) of a bowl of soup. They’re threads knotted together with a devastating sadness that lingers long after we’ve been hand-held into the next life.

Much of the film’s heart can be found in the spirit taking us on this journey. Gudo is an imminently likeable creation.  A masked sprite, with witch-like hands that belie his gentle personality and a tilted mask adorned with a perma-fixed grin that also provides plenty of contradictions to the depth behind this unreadable façade. His mid-film uttering, delivered wonderfully by Chung Suet-ying, that he can “feel my heart shattering” is one of many moments in which the audience will unavoidably feel the same.

The setting may be fantastical, but there are still enough moments that hold up a mirror to the real world, not least with the creation of the ‘Wraths’. Born from a seed of evil growing insidiously inside a human, they burst forth, transforming the host into a hideous, but often gorgeously rendered monster. Not only are they involved in some of the film’s most impressive set-pieces, they are also a manifestation of hatred, and a warning of the toll that being angry at the world takes on us all. Another World might be rooted in loss and melancholy, but its overall message is one of optimism and new beginnings.

A stunning, layered, multi-generational tale of grief and belief, Another World is an endlessly creative piece of storytelling that will put a knot in your stomach and some hope in your heart.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist