‘Rennervations’ series review: Anil Kapoor is the saving grace in Jeremy Renner’s middling docuseries

For those who watch enough automobile shows on History TV and Discovery Turbo, the concept of renovating old and rusty vehicles into usable, road-legal ones, is anything but new. But Renner’s new show, at least on paper, is more than that. It’s about giving back to the community, and the show picks up an intriguing idea of choosing four charities and making customised vehicles suited to that particular charity’s need.

For Chicago’s Base, it’s a Mobile Music Bus while for Mexico’s Casa Hogar, they build a Mobile Dance Studio. Reno’s Big Brothers Big Sisters gets a Mobile Recreation Center and for the Indian-based Uva Jagriti Sansthan, a Mobile Water Treatment Center is made from scratch. If that’s not enough, Renner oversees the operations and brings in a celebrity friend for each episode to present the modified vehicle to the charity. Apart from cameos featuring Anthony Mackie, Vanessa Hudgens, Anil Kapoor and Sebastián Yatra, we are also introduced to Renner’s business partner Rory Millikin and their crew of fabricators.

Rennervations tries to be a feel-good show about community service, and it does tick all the right boxes. However, it comes off largely as a boring documentary that rarely entertains. For starters, the builders are given a deadline to turn dilapidated buses and trucks into unique projects on wheels, and we see them cracking their heads over coming up with solutions. It does beg the question of why a vehicle made for underprivileged children be completed within a timeframe. Even if we go past the obvious doubt of why Renner has 200 plus space-munching vehicles, ranging from a humble buggy to firetrucks, the limitations, challenges and altercations that arise while building the vehicles feel more fabricated than the trucks themselves.

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Renner, despite being a brilliant actor, isn’t a great show presenter, and it shows when he interacts with the children under the care of the charities. Of course, the emotions displayed and the tears spent are unquestionable but the video calls he makes to his celebrity friends who agree to the task even before Renner completes his sentence feel more staged than the one the fabricators build for the Mobile Dance Studio. Surprisingly, it’s Rory who brings the much-needed entertainment quotient to the show. The banter between him and Renner is fun. The starting credits feature Renner saying, “I want to make actionability and thoughtfulness of others cool as f***,” only for Rory to retort with a “You can’t say f*** on Disney, dude.”

It’s the episodes featuring Anthony Mackie and our very own Anil Kapoor that feel more organic thanks to their charismatic off-screen persona. Mackie’s episode features a nostalgic shot of the two Avengers actors briefly travelling on a military Hummer that’s juxtaposed with their scenes from the 2008 war film The Hurt Locker. But it’s the final episode featuring Renner’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocolco-star Anil Kapoor that steals the show. Unlike the other stars who join their respective episodes just to shake a leg at the end, Kapoor appears throughout the fourth episode, mocking Rory, discussing plans with the fabricators, giving ideas that make it to the final design and of course, shakes a leg.