THE WRECKER (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Wrecker, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2025

The Wrecker features one sequence that is so gloriously stupid that it's really a shame the rest of the movie is just numbingly dumb and incompetent. It's almost an accomplishment how poorly it fares, considering the plot and characters really don't have to do much within the simple vein in which the material exists.

Niko Foster stars as Tony, while also co-writing the screenplay and producing, in what's surely meant to be an effort to gain the actor some level of legitimacy as a rising action star. To be fair, the actor has a solid smirk and some degree of charm as this character, a former military man who was dishonorably discharged for broadly honorable but rather unconvincing reasons.

See, a single flashback shows a young Tony watching as his brother unintentionally shoots himself in the head with their father's pistol, believing the gun is unloaded. This tragedy, which no one—not even the adult Tony himself or another sibling in the room where the incident happened—discusses or even vaguely alludes to in any way throughout the rest of the movie, means that our protagonist refuses to even touch a firearm.

Of course, this leads one to wonder why our guy would join the military in the first place and how he managed to get through training with this philosophy—let alone wind up on a battlefield where, according to his official record, he refuses to fire at enemy forces. If the script (co-written by Sophia Louisa Lee and James Dean Simington) can't even get the logic of its back story to make any sense, imagine what the rest of the movie must be like.

Well, it is the narrative mess one might anticipate, with a string of seemingly disconnected scenes across a few montages introducing us to characters without any context. We meet Tony, who works in an auto garage and has a troublemaker of a younger brother.

Bobby (Chad Michael Collins), the brother, has stolen an expensive sports car, and it turns out it belongs to Dante (Harvey Keitel), the biggest crime boss "since Al Capone." The first incomprehensible montage shows him killing a cop, while Det. Boswell (Tyrese Gibson) wanders an abandoned factory/warehouse in footage that might have been cut or repurposed from the movie's climax, considering how far removed his scenes feel from what's actually happening. Fans or morbidly curious viewers of these on-the-cheap actioners will be made especially happy by the last sentence, because, yes, there are not one, but two, sequences that take place in this subgenre's go-to setting for action.

Anyway, Dante's henchmen catch Tony and Bobby. The crime boss gives Tony an ultimatum: Either he does a string of jobs for Dante, or the mobster will kill him and Bobby. This is a simple choice for the guy, since he wants to save his brother and is also a single father to two daughters—although Tony does seem to have a problem remembering just how many kids he has.

That's not a joke, by the way. After Tony refuses to do one errand that involves killing someone, Dante sends some goons to shoot up the guy's house, making a point to say not to hurt his family. Obviously, this is a ludicrous caveat to put on that order, but in an even more ridiculous moment, Tony tries to save one daughter from the house, only to have a montage play out in his head to remind him that he has another kid still inside. The ending, by the way, is the second time Tony, not to mention the entire movie itself, forgets the existence of a second child, but by that point, such an oversight is the norm for this material.

Nothing else is really worth mentioning, except that Tony's weapon of choice is a big wrench and he drives a very conspicuous tow truck that he calls Black Betty—even to perform all of these illegal deeds on Dante's behalf or to get revenge on the crime boss. To answer an obvious question, yes, some part of the movie's limited budget went toward getting the rights to the song that immediately popped into your head as soon as you read the truck's name.

To answer a question that you might have been asking about The Wrecker from the start of this review, the gloriously stupid scene involves the truck, too. It lasts the length of the song, as Tony takes his rig, now equipped with armor and mounted machine guns and a flamethrower, on a killing spree. It's an all-too-brief flash of over-the-top nonsense for the sake of it—something that makes the rest of the movie look even more boring by comparison.

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