Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry’s action comedy “The Union” should have been more fun. Or more exciting. It certainly had a lot going in its favor, including big stars and a budget to travel around the world.
But it doesn’t have the charm to make it anything more than a Netflix movie playing in the background.
“The Union,” which airs Friday, is a fairy tale – a very masculine story, about a middle-aged ordinary man whose life never got started and who is suddenly recruited to become a spy. Mike is a penniless construction worker who still lives with his mom in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, hanging out in bars with his old friends. His biggest recent triumph was a one-night affair with his 7th grade English teacher and the one event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks where he is the best man.
All of this is to say that for Mike, it’s a breath of fresh air when his old high school girlfriend Roxanne walks into the bar one evening looking like a punk rock superhero. Glamorous and confident, she has clearly found a life outside of Patterson. The problem, or rather a problem I guess, is that we already know what she does. Instead of putting the audience in Mike’s shoes as a fish out of water trying to figure out why he’s woken up in a luxury suite in London after meeting his high school ex-girlfriend at his hometown bar, “The Union” starts with Roxanne. It begins with a kind of “Mission: Impossible” style extraction gone wrong in Trieste, Italy, where most of her team ends up dead
The idea came from Stephen Levinson, who is Wahlberg’s longtime business partner, who together helped bring to life another mid-grade Netflix action-comedy in “Spenser Confidential.” And it was very basically directed by Julian Farino, a veteran director who has directed several episodes of “Entourage,” and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there’s a kind of charming fantasy about the notion that anyone can become an international spy with the opportunity and a few weeks of training. In the movies, the women find out they’re secret royalty and the men find out they’re secretly great spies.
“The Union” never gets its rhythm going. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, but I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be. J.K. Simmons is given very little to work with as the head of this secret agency, which also features underwritten characters played by Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Alice Lee. One of the more successful running jokes is that Mike’s undercover character is from Boston. A hulking English henchman even has a heart-to-heart talk with him about “Good Will Hunting.”
Berry and Wahlberg are fine together, they have an easy rapport, but there’s no chemistry. This wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t try to have a romance between a woman who has forgotten her roots and a guy who needs to forget his roots. I never liked the idea that either of them were really still thinking about their high school relationship and what went wrong. There’s been a lot in the interim life to reflect on decisions made at 17. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn or Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but maybe the story should have been changed to suit these actors.
There’s not enough there – action, comedy, romance, art – to hold your full attention.
The film “The Union,” which is released Friday on Netflix, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “scenes of strong violence, suggestive content and some strong language.” Film duration: 107 minutes. One-and-a-half stars out of four.
This article is generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
