The Union (2024)
Directed by: Julian Farino
Premise: A blue-collar worker (Mark Wahlberg) is tapped to help a spy agency recover a list of covert assets before it falls into the wrong hands.
What Works: The one aspect of The Union that works is the relationship between Mark Wahlberg’s character and his former girlfriend turned spy played by Halle Berry. It’s the quiet and flirty moments between them that really work. They have a natural and easy banter that’s likable. It’s a shame Wahlberg and Berry weren’t paired together in a better movie.
What Doesn’t: The Union comes from Netflix and stars two high profile movie stars so viewers ought to be able to expect a certain amount of competence from the filmmaking. Not so. The Union is an incredibly shoddy production. It consistently looks cheap and amateurish. The lighting is ugly in a way that makes everything look flat and fake. The Union was allegedly shot on location but the cinematography is so ugly that the movie often looks as though it was filmed on a digital backlot. The story is a generic espionage plot. Recycling a conceit that Mission: Impossible has used at least twice, a list of America’s worldwide intelligence assets is loose and must be recovered before it’s purchased by an adversarial nation. We’ve seen this scenario many times and done much better. There are no tangible stakes to The Union. The drama is inert and there’s little sense of momentum or escalation. The one place where the filmmakers insert some novelty is the blue-collar spy concept. Hollywood generally presents espionage as genteel and glamorous; The Union imagines a working-class spy organization that is the foil to the elite agencies. It’s a unique take but it’s also dumb. There’s no reason why the agency needs Mark Wahlberg’s character. He has no skills or knowledge that make him uniquely positioned for the job so there’s no reason for him to be here. The action of The Union is mediocre. There are a couple of well staged fights but many of the car chases and shootouts are dull and well below the standard of contemporary action pictures. The Union also suffers from some bizarre music selections. The soundtrack includes a lot of awkwardly placed songs. The filmmakers don’t appear to be going for comedy or irony; the songs don’t comment on the action. Like so much of this movie, it’s an inexplicable creative choice.
Disc extras: Available on Netflix.
Bottom Line: The Union is a stupid and cliché story told with shoddy filmmaking. It’s barely a movie. The Union continues Netflix’s streak of lousy and lazy espionage stories such as Heart of Stone and Red Notice.
Episode: #1010 (August 25, 2024)