The Union, Netflix’s newest original feature film starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, is sort of like the Wahlburger of spy romps.
At the risk of sounding contemptuous, watching Wahlberg and Berry waste their considerable talent on a goofy action movie with a mediocre plot that no one, and I mean no one, will remember or talk about a month from now feels, I don’t know, like paying $16 for a mid hamburger. The movie, from director Julian Farino, stars Wahlberg as a broke, middle-aged schlub who works in construction, who’s never left his New Jersey hometown, and by the end of the movie gets to play superspy for a little while.
Suffice it to say, this thing has fallen completely flat with both critics and fans (it’s got a 44% and 30%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). And, of course, it’s the #1 movie on Netflix at the moment, because … well, because more often than not the major streamers are simply unbound and unbothered by the constraints of our fleeting reality. While you and I have to work hard to prove our worth every day to our superiors, too many streaming TV shows and movies get to exist for no other reason than because somebody woke up one day and decided it should be so.
“Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a down-to-earth construction worker from Jersey, is quickly thrust into the world of super spies and secret agents when his high school sweetheart Roxanne (Halle Berry) recruits him on a high-stakes US intelligence mission,” Netflix’s logline explains. Which is a reminder that there are basically two kinds of spy movies: Intelligent and thrilling peeks into a secret world populated by ghost warriors, and wacky paint-by-numbers stories where spies come off like thinly drawn Marvel characters.
In The Union, Berry’s Roxanne shows up one day to recruit Mike for a dangerous intelligence mission in Europe. And just like that, the two high school lovebirds are making up for lost time by gallivanting around Europe amid spies and high-speed car chases — because the script writers for this thing were apparently asked “How many spy movie tropes can you think of?” before responding with a confident yes.
Really, The Union did little more than leave me with two profound and unpleasant questions: One, why does a movie this mediocre need to exist? And, two, at what point am I going to stop being the chump who’s still paying Netflix for these throwaways — kind of like Charlie repeatedly charging headlong at Lucy and her football, when we all know full well what’s about to happen.
