Blue collar James Bonds are kind of a dime a dozen these days. I mean, Vin Diesel gave us Xander Cage in xXx, while Kingsman presented us with Taron Egerton’s Eggsy and Hollywood seems low-key obsessed with offering up super spies that have a slightly more relatable past while saving the entire planet with funky gadgets and death defying stunts. However, if you were to tell me that another one of these movies were about to pop up I’d be fairly interested – I mean they’re fun, right? – but then if you were to back pedal and then tell me that this was a Netflix movie, my blood would immediately run cold.
My growing annoyance with the fact the streaming site can’t seem to make a comedy/spy/actioner to save their damn lives is not a fact I hold particularly close to my chest, but once again I decided to take yet another plunge into the world of deeply mediocre, star driven, streamed, spy comedies in the desperate hope that just one of these damn things will actually be worth my time.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
Mike McKenna is a salt-of-the-earth construction worker from New Jersey who spends his days perched casually on girders a thousand feet in the air while Bruce Springsteen needledrops or chugging beers with his buddies at his local watering hole while they discuss their cash flow woes. However, one day his life is flipped like a pancake when his ex high-school sweetheart Roxanne Hall suddenly re-enters his life after disappearing 25 years earlier with a really startling offer.
You see, Rox is a member of secret spy organisation, The Union, which has been experiencing some issues with its latest mission being quite a disaster that saw a bunch of agents killed and a whole lot of government intelligence in the wind. Taking her cue presumably from Michael Bay’s Armageddon, Rox figures that in the face of failure, all she needs to do to circumvent an obvious mole is simply hire someone who is the complete opposite of a slick super spy to throw off the bad guys. While we struggle with this titanic lapse of logic, Rox zips over to New Jersey, reconnects with her stunned ex, drugs him with a hypo and whisks him back to the Union’s headquarters located in the BT Tower in London.
While her gruff boss, Brennan, speaks for all of us when his best agent suggests turning a construction worker into a highly trained operative in two weeks, Mike nevertheless is thrown into a world of intrigue and mystery as he bounces all over Europe in order to save the world.
But while Rox struggles to get Mike up to speed, the two also struggle to reconcile their past as 25 years of betrayal can’t help but bubble to the surface. But with car chases, gun fights and double crosses lurking around every corner, is trying to save the free world a good time to debate a titanic dumping?
It’s with a deep sigh and a much rolling of eyeballs that I have to report that The Union is just the latest of a long line of subpar action films that Netflix seems to be happy to churn out to appease subscribe desperate for any new content. Maybe I should be a bit more understanding, especially when every now and then, the streaming service delivers a great, original stuff, such as Jeremy Saulnier’s magnificently muscular Rebel Ridge, but every time of these “other” movies show up, it’s almost like I can hear the tinny squeal as cinema suffers yet another slice in a drawn out death of a thousand cuts.
Melodramatic? Certainly, but my mind can’t help but have ample time to wander as it’s utterly unengaged by the events transpiring on screen. In fact, the most impressive part of Julian Farino’s movie is that it aggressively refuses to hit any target put in front of it – it’s an action film that isn’t exciting that features comedy that isn’t funny about a love story that contains no chemistry. Furthermore, it’s a big budget movie that looks horribly cheap as its colourful visual pallette comes off as absurdly bland; and confronted with yet another example of Netflix’s casual disregard for quality content, it can’t help but feel like it’s being squished into my eyes like searing burn of a squirt of lemon juice.
If it was just outright awful or incompetent, maybe you could at least drain some so-bad-it’s-good dregs from its carcass, but The Unions’ true crime is that it’s unforgivably boring from the first minute it starts to the very end. Let’s put it this way, even the injection of such goofy lines as “What does my asshole have to do with psychology?” do nothing to endear itself to you and you strongly suspect that much of the movie is set around the BT Tower in order to allow the actors to phone in their performances at a cheaper rate. Some, like J.K. Simmons and Jackie Earl Haley, manage to worm their way through the flick with a minimum of fuss, while others, such as Mike Colter, are rendered utterly nonsensical thanks to a script that stumbles with every possible trope despite stealing hungrily from every spy comedy from recent memory (what, do you think I’d forgotten Grosse Pointe Blank?).
However, it’s the startling amounts of non-chemstry between Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry that really make things close to unwatchable and their scenes together contain so little spark you wonder if they were ever in the same room at the same time any time action wasn’t being shouted.
Let’s put it this way, the last time Mark Wahlberg wandered into London and started mocking the locals was in the catastrophic Transformers: The Last Knight and we all know how that turned out and his attempt to be a fifty year old, New Jersey James Bond who can out-shoot trained assassins while still managing to take time to remind everyone he’s from Boston (we know, Mark!). On the flipside, while Wahlberg at least delivers his typical, out-of-breath schtick, Berry looks utterly disinterested while equipped in a unused Storm hairstyle and some leftover baggage from Die Another Day. Fittingly enough her apathy mirrors that of the pace of the film, that throws action sequences and comedy interludes at you not only barely entices you to look up from your phone, but practically endorses it.
There’s not even any real surprises here as the mystery villain becomes overwhelmingly obvious the second it’s revealed that a character has come back from the dead in a twist that’s become over-used even back when Mission: Impossible or Goldeneye used it. How are these Netflix scripts getting financed? Did Wahlberg and Berry sign on before the script was finalised and they just thought “fuck it, let’s start filming anyway”? Don’t these people realise that if this film had gotten a serious theatrical release, careers could very well have been shortened or ended outright by this half-hearted, fun-free effort that makes even the lesser attempts of Roger Moore’s James Bond era look as vital as fucking Casino Royale.
The Union needs to be broken up, immediately.
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