Jeremy Renner got into the media this year mainly with tragic news: he was run over by his snowmobile, a vehicle weighing six tons, on New Year’s Day. The 52-year-old survived the accident with serious injuries, he had 35 broken bones.
He can now walk again with aids and has now completed his first appointment on the red carpet. That was definitely a motivation for him, because it was the premiere of his own series “Rennervations”. A pun on his last name and the word renovations.
And that’s what the four episodes, which will be released on April 12, are about: Renner converts old buses with a team (or rather: lets his team convert them). The whole thing can be seen on Renner’s home channel Disney Plus. There he became known to a younger audience. In the “Avengers” series, a comic book adaptation, Renner plays the archer Hawkeye every time.
Unfortunately, there isn’t nearly as much action in “Rennervations,” which was filmed before his accident. Renner buys decommissioned government vehicles like old school buses and rebuilds them. In the first episode, it becomes a mobile music studio for an organization in Chicago. In the other three episodes he turns old buses into a mobile dance studio in Mexico or a water filter truck in India.
Even as a child he liked to build, he says. When it comes to the music bus, he says a little too often: “It sounds a bit crazy what we’re planning here.” But it’s not all that crazy, because he has a team of very experienced technicians around him.
The first episode is called “The Music Bus (with Vanessa Hudgens)”, in fact Hudgens only appears in the last four minutes of the 47-minute episode. It would have made sense to involve the musician at least in the planning and allocation of the bus beforehand.
But that doesn’t happen. In long planning discussions, it is explained how the bus should be. There will be three areas, a “chill arena” for writing lyrics, a soundproof area as a studio for recording music and a technical cabin.
After more than 20 minutes it finally starts, only then the conversion is shown a bit and you think for a moment that it is now getting more exciting when a technician explains how he connects 20 conventional car batteries to a power supply. But nothing there.
You don’t see Renner remodeling, no, he taps out calendar sayings: “The only difference between madness and courage is a plan,” for example.
At some point the bus will be finished without you actually being there as a spectator or being able to really be happy with the team. So “Rennervations” doesn’t have a real arc of suspense, nor is it a tutorial, it just ripples along.
The story of the first episode would have been told in two before and after pictures on Instagram or in a short TikTok reel. And after all, that’s the target group that “Avengers” racers actually want to address at Disney. In fact, it’s just a promotional video for Renner showing he’s doing something good for PR purposes.
Unfortunately, Jeremy Renner had a lot more fun filming than the viewers watching.
