Demolition Brothers: Momoa and Bautista in a Routine Action-Comedy

Jonny Hale is a police officer whose life has gone to hell, as evidenced by his recent breakup with his girlfriend Valentina and his unresolved relationship with his father Walter, whom he hasn't seen in years. When one evening he is targeted by Japanese yakuza hitmen who break into his home, he realizes that something serious is about to happen or has already happened. Shortly after, he discovers that his parent has died in what initially appears to be a simple car accident, but which hides much deeper implications.

In Demolition Brothers, Jonny is thus forced to return to his native Hawaii, a paradise he had abandoned long ago after another tragedy. There, he is awaited by James, a former Navy SEAL stepbrother with iron discipline, who works as a military instructor and is an apparently irreproachable and happy family man. The two couldn't be more different from each other, but they will soon have to put aside grudges and differences to discover the truth about their common father's death and uncover a conspiracy involving local organized crime and political interests at the highest levels.

Forced Together

Director Angel Manuel Soto, of Puerto Rican descent, made a name for himself early in his career with two interesting coming-of-age films, La Granja (2013) and Twelve (2020), leading him to be entrusted with the direction of the ill-fated Blue Beetle (2023), the first DC film dedicated to a Latin American superhero, released as the old DCU was dying in favor of James Gunn's reboot.

An old-school comic book movie in which he demonstrated a certain sense of rhythm and an ability to manage spectacular sequences, albeit confined within a relatively classic narrative structure. With Demolition Brothers, he decided to dedicate himself to pure action cinema, abandoning fantastic and superheroic elements to focus on a buddy movie that openly looks to the 1980s and 1990s canons of the genre, a golden age probably unrepeatable.

We are faced with an operation that lives and dies on the chemistry between the two protagonists. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista bring to the screen the muscular charisma that the genre requires, trying to combine imposing physicality with a proverbial self-deprecating verve. The former plays the more impetuous brother with his usual swagger, while the latter – fresh from a significant weight loss that makes him visually less imposing than in the past – offers a more restrained and partially nuanced performance. Their conflictual relationship, made of continuous bickering and misunderstandings, works quite well, complete with a brawl between the two and constant references to colleagues like John Cena, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the "hated" The Rock, with whom Bautista himself has had some friction in the past.

A Story That Offers Nothing New

It's a shame that the screenplay never manages to elevate the material beyond the most hackneyed conventions of the genre. The plot proceeds on largely predictable tracks, with telegraphed revelations from the very first minutes and a handling of the villains that borders on caricature, despite the charismatic presence of Claes Bang, a talented Danish actor who shone among many in The Square (2017) and is here reduced to a kind of anonymous caricature.

The Hawaiian setting certainly represents a strong point of the operation, effectively exploiting the tropical landscapes to offer the viewer an exotic location, with beaches and residential neighborhoods becoming the scene of chases and assorted shootouts, with cars speeding at a hundred miles an hour and helicopters looming overhead. The cinematography captures the vibrant colors of the island even when the action becomes chaotic, at least managing to satisfy the aesthetic expectation of an audience ready to be transported to a paradisiacal setting.

But as they say, a good game doesn't last long, and instead here, with its one hundred and twenty-five minutes including credits, the film drags on wearily on several occasions, a victim of a story that struggles to find the right rhythm and introduces secondary characters without fully developing them. Action movies of this type would need greater immediacy, and the excessive length only highlights the writing limitations. The first half hour essentially serves to establish the dynamics between the protagonists and could easily have been condensed, while the third act stretches into a succession of double-crosses and betrayals that unnecessarily complicate a plot that is, in fact, much simpler than what is shown.

The presence in the cast of Morena Baccarin and Temuera Morrison adds further spice, but Demolition Brothers lacks the necessary depth to be anything more than a buddy/b-movie tailor-made for the undemanding streaming market, as confirmed by its exclusive release directly in the Amazon Prime Video catalog.