Dwayne Johnson kicked down plenty of doors in Hollywood, and not just during action sequences. As the most successful wrestler-turned-actor of all time, Johnson went from Arnold-throwback outlier to one of the biggest movie stars in the world to, now, he hopes, more seriously thespian. (The Smashing Machine may have bombed in theaters, but it’s currently attracting new viewers on HBO Max.) His journey has left more space in his wake for other burly guys, whether it’s an actual ex-wrestler like Dave Bautista or just a guy with a wrestler’s physique and sensibility like Jason Momoa.
Bautista and Momoa are paired up in the new direct-to-streaming movie The Wrecking Crew, and it’s a reminder that despite these performers getting access to a far greater range of roles than, say, the late Hulk Hogan had back in the day, there are definitely certain stock parts available to the likes of Bautista, Momoa, John Cena, and so on. There are the lower-rung action vehicles where almost all of these guys start out; the comedies that humorously juxtapose a large man with small children (see Bautista in My Spy, Momoa in the Minecraft movie, Cena in Playing with Fire, etc.); the big-ticket franchise ensembles where the big tough guy gets to be more of an added-value ingredient than a star attraction (Bautista in Guardians of the Galaxy; Momoa and Cena in the Fast & Furious movies that also include Johnson and similarly wrestler-style Vin Diesel); and more adult-oriented comedies where they can poke fun at their own image (Cena does this most frequently in stuff like Sisters and Blockers).
Bautista in particular has both conformed to that model while trying to find space to defy it. Early in his career, he was buzzed-about as maybe the best pure actor of this bunch. He repeatedly teamed with Denis Villeneuve in Blade Runner 2049 and Dune; he brought a lot of comic relief to the Guardians movies while at the same time not seeming beholden to the Marvel Method; he played a gentle but imposing stranger in Knock at the Cabin; he wore those little glasses sometimes. But as Bautista has taken more leading roles, he doesn’t seem quite so polished in larger doses.
That’s true in The Wrecking Crew, where Bautista is, as he is surprisingly often, positioned as a more upright, by-the-book character. Here it’s more by default, because he’s the straight-faced family man in a pair of mismatched brothers investigating the death of their private-eye father in Hawaii, with Momoa as the wilder, crazier one. Though the movie wants to sell them as mutually rough-and-tumble types – hence The Wrecking Crew – they’re actually both pretty strict institutionalists; Bautista is a military guy, while Momoa plays a cop. He repeats this so often you’re waiting for a plot point about how he was actually kicked off the force, or never hired.
Momoa is also the actor who seems to be having the most fun here, maybe out of love for Hawaii, where he has actual roots. He’s really just doing a more profane and violent take on the cocksure goof he played for the kids of Minecraft. Bautista, meanwhile, remains an engaging physical performer – the movie’s best action sequences tend to be the smaller-scale fights, rather than the CG-slathered vehicular-mayhem stuff – but putting him next to Momoa only exacerbates his tendency to come across as stiff, dramatically speaking. He’s often too straightforward to put across mischievous movie-star charisma, and his roles in Guardians and Knock at the Cabin are some of the only sustained acting jobs where he is able to convey something underneath the surface, something that might be at odds with what he’s presenting to the world.
A movie like The Wrecking Crew doesn’t exactly depend on a sense of mystery, despite the plot literally turning on one. And that’s part of why Bautista is also doing fine; out of all the Big Burly Guys fighting over a certain type of part, he’s the one who seems most flexible about jumping between the aforementioned stock roles. Well past his Hollywood breakthrough and he’ll still book a movie like Afterburn, a barely-released post-apocalyptic action thriller that Momoa or Cena would probably be too choosy to even think about making. You can also glory to Bautista’s willingness to star in something like In the Lost Lands, an utterly sincere fantasy-action epic from Paul W.S. Anderson, and so do far more convincingly than most of his peers could. He has a little bit of Dwayne Johnson’s slightly otherworldly quality that makes him convincing in pulp versions of the distant past or future.
Something else shared by the post-Rock bruisers is how often they trade on an ambiguous or flexible ethnicity. Just as Dwayne Johnson comes from Black Canadian and Samoan parentage, Momoa has a native Hawaiian father, while Bautista comes from Greek and Filipino background. They’re simultaneously othered in their standing outside of whiteness and All-American in their mixed heritage. Bautista hasn’t played as directly to that heritage as Johnson or Momoa, who have taken opportunities to work their backgrounds into major franchises. But putting Bautista and Momoa together in The Wrecking Crew, with the Hawaii backdrop actually integral to the movie’s plot, really does differentiate this group from the Arnold-Sly-Seagal-Van Damme cabal of the past – the Expendables, if you will. Those older action stars often felt like they were in competition with one another, and didn’t team up until later in their careers. Burly as Bautista, Momoa, and Cena all are, there seems to be plenty of room for all of them.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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