Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry’s action comedy “The Union” should have been funnier. Or more exciting. It certainly had a lot going for it, including big stars and a budget to travel the world. But it lacks a certain charm that might have helped make it something 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 mother in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, and hangs out in bars with his old friends. His biggest recent triumph was a one-night affair with his seventh-grade English teacher, and the one event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks. He’s 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 in a leather motorcycle jacket. Glamorous and confident and never one to care about her hair falling into her eyes, she has clearly found a life outside of Patterson. The problem, or I guess, a problem, 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 plush London suite 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 for the movie came from Stephen Levinson, Wahlberg’s longtime business partner, who together helped bring to life another middle-of-the-road Netflix action-comedy in “Spenser Confidential.” It’s directed by Julian Farino, a journeyman who 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 a moderately successful international spy with the opportunity and a few weeks of training. In the movies, women find out they’re secret royalty and men find out they’re secretly great spies.
But “The Union” never finds its rhythm. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, though I suppose that’s what it should be. J.K. Simmons is given 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 bought into the idea that either of them is 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 age 17. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn or Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but maybe in this case the story should have been changed to better serve its actors.
That’s a small thing for something with much bigger problems. And ultimately “The Union” suffers the same fate as many expensive streaming films before it: It doesn’t have enough of what’s in it — 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.
