Producers: Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Jeff Waxman Director: Julian Farino Screenplay: Joe Barton and David Guggenheim Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Halle Berry, J.K. Simmons, Mike Colter, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica De Gouw, Alice Lee, Jackie Earle Haley, Lorraine Bracco, Dana Delany, Patch Darragh, James McMenamin, Juan Carlos Hernandez and Stephen Campbell Moore Distributor: Netflix
Grade: C
There’s plenty of efficiency involved in manufacturing a by-the-numbers action comedy like “The Union,” from cobbling together a script that contains all the necessary tropes to assembling a watchable cast to choreographing the obligatory chases, gunfights and stunts. It’s the spies who populate the result that are all, by narrative necessity, incompetent.
So it is with the members of the eponymous U.S. organization, a super-secret outfit that supposedly can handle crises beyond the abilities of the usual alphabet soup of public agencies. After a botched operation in Trieste to retrieve a computer loaded with information on the West’s operatives that costs the Union six of its crew, survivor Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry) convinces her hard-talking boss Tom Brennan (J.K. Simmons) that the right man to replace her dead partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter) is a complete newbie, Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), an old flame from her high school days in Paterson, New Jersey. He’s a rambunctious construction worker, one of those guys who’ve never grown up, still live with their mothers and spend their off-time womanizing and drinking. Mike’s introduced waking up in the bed he’s shared with his seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany) and boozing it up with his pals over a pool table in their favorite bar. Roxanne simply waltzes into the bar, invites him to a sort of reunion outside, then drugs and kidnaps him.
He wakes up in London, where he’s invited to join the Union, says yes and undergoes the usual couple of days training before becoming an integral cog in a mission to recover the MacGuffin—that device stolen in Trieste—that’s being auctioned off online. Naturally his introduction to undercover operations goes awry, and the team—he and Roxanne in particular—must go through hoop after hoop to track down the villains and prevent the intel from being sold to the Iranians. (One of the saddest elements of the finale is that the chief Iranian negotiator begins by saying “Let’s finish this quickly.” Would that they could, but it turns out there’s thirty minutes of mayhem left. And Mike has to get back in time to serve as best man at his buddy’s wedding!)
There’s plenty of unsurprising twists (including suspicion there’s a mole in the organization), empty derring-do and mindless brawling—as well as intermittent pauses for bonding between Mike and Roxanne—as the screenplay by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim follows its inexorable path to a flamboyantly hectic resolution on the beautiful Istrian coast (shot in glossy tones by cinematographer Alan Stewart). The supporting cast is capable—in addition to Simmons, who delivers his customary stentorian turn, the Union agents include Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Alice Kim and Jackie Earle Haley, while Lorraine Bracco gets laughs in her few scenes as Mike’s know-it-all mother and Stephen Campbell Moore elicits hisses as an officious CIA man who, of course, is always wrong. Jessica De Gouw makes a slinky villainess.
But though the movie is competently put together, with capable direction from Julian Farino, a solid production design (Morgan Kennedy) and nice costumes (Beatrix Aruna Pasztor), and is decently edited by Pia Di Ciaula, it all feels prefabricated; it’s also burdened with a score by Rupert Gregson-Williams that accentuates the air of over-familiarity.
As for Wahlberg and Berry, they make an agreeable pair, even if their banter is second-rate and the trajectory their characters follow is all too reminiscent of other films of this sort. Naturally after the mission is over they wind up together at that wedding back in Paterson, and a closing sequence with Simmons indicates that they’re to be a Union team in future. Cue another Netflix action franchise.
But not one to especially look forward to. One of the cutesy “aren’t-they-made-for-each-other” moments Mike and Roxanne share comes when they awake from a night in bed together and accuse one another of snoring–“You snore, no you snore.” The truth is that despite all the frenetic action and pounding music, a cookie-cutter movie like this, however slickly done, is bound to make us all snore.