A construction worker is recruited by his ex-girlfriend, a spy, to join her secret organization, which has a dangerous mission. With Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg. Premiering August 16 on Netflix.
Netflix’s usual output seems to require that every few months there be an action movie, usually with a somewhat comedic tone, filmed in various locations in Europe and generic enough to resemble other well-known ones. It is, at least in this respect, like a company that makes neat imitations of other brands, the kind that are not easily distinguished when you see them but if you look closely you realize that the quality is not the same. It is, yes, a neat copy.
Con THE UNION That’s exactly what happens. It’s the version made in Netflix of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLEan international thriller with secret agencies hiding beneath other secret agencies, who have to find data in suitcases with encrypted materials, who have as their protagonists a group of specialized technicians, who suffer surprise blows that put them on the verge of disappearance, who have to deal with one or more traitors and who travel around a good part of Europe (beautiful tourist places in Italy and Slovenia, in this case, as well as London) chasing each other. Tom Cruise is not in it, but by changing some details he could be.
Here the protagonists are two: Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg. The first (who was already part of a James Bond movie, another saga that is similar) is Roxanne, the operational leader of the so-called Syndicate, one of those agencies that operate secretly and behind the CIA, MI6, etc. After a serious setback in an operation in Trieste and needing to recover a suitcase containing important data for the security of the entire world (when not? Will they ever fight over the secret of a grandma’s cooking recipe?), Roxanne comes up with a strange idea to surprise her rivals: to add someone to the group that would be totally unexpected, outside of any list that the supposed enemies have.
The guy’s name is Mike (Wahlberg, thankfully breaking away from his string of religious-themed movies for a while) and he’s her ex-boyfriend from high school in New Jersey, a skilled worker who works on cranes, a friendly, self-assured guy who isn’t afraid to take risks. Plus, well, he was her boyfriend, and what better way to take advantage of the fact that the CIA pays his salary than to have a risky vacation in Europe. So Mike is taken “on the sly” from his neighborhood, they explain to him what’s going on, they convince him to be part of the group, they train him, and they put him in the middle of the action.
And that, my friends, is THE UNION. A little bit of the aforementioned M:Ia little bit Bond, and a little bit any kind of “remarriage” action comedy where a woman and a man who were together reconnect by dodging bullets and car chases from Eastern European thugs and so on. There will be a number of characters working with them (including JK Simmons, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Alice Lee, Jackie Earle Haley, in a by-now prototypically ethnically correct cast) and they soon realise that if they’re always late everywhere it’s because someone on the inside is betraying them. But who?
Some well-applied surprises, some action scenes handled with a certain sobriety by the director who worked for years with Wahlberg in ENTOURAGE and the relative charisma of the protagonists (including the ever-grumpy Simmons) make it THE UNION It will pass more or less unscathed through the eyes and ears of the viewer who hangs out for a weekend to see what’s on Netflix. In that sense, the very athletic fifty-something duo of Berry-Wahlberg emerges more or less intact from the content-producing machine, survives for one more adventure and we will most likely see them in one or another sequel over the next few years. That, more or less, is how it works.
