The Union Falls Flat as an Action Comedy

The Union, an action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, had all the ingredients to be a fun and exciting movie. However, it fails to deliver on its promise, lacking a certain charm that could have made it more than just a Netflix movie playing in the background.

Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry in The Union

The movie follows Mike, a broke construction worker living in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey, who gets recruited to be a spy out of the blue. Mike’s life never quite got started, and he’s still living with his mother, hanging out with his old friends in bars. His biggest win of late was a one-night stand with his 7th grade English teacher, and the one event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks where he’s the best man.

That’s all to say that for Mike, it is a breath of fresh air when his old high school girlfriend Roxanne, played by Halle Berry, 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 a problem I think, is that we already know what she does. Instead of putting the audience in Mike’s shoes, as the 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 in his hometown bar, The Union starts on Roxanne. It begins with a kind of Mission: Impossible-style extraction gone wrong, in Trieste, Italy, where most of her team ends up dead.

Halle Berry in The Union

The idea came from Stephen Levinson, Wahlberg’s longtime business partner, who together helped bring another middle of the road Netflix action-comedy to life in Spenser Confidential. And it was directed very basically by Julian Farino, a journeyman director who helmed many episodes of Entourage, and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there is a sort of charming fantasy about the notion that anyone could be an international spy given the opportunity and a few weeks of training. In the movies, women get to find out they’re secret royalty and men get to find out they’re secretly great spies.

Mark Wahlberg in The Union

The Union never quite hits its stride tonally. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, but I think that’s what it would prefer to be. J.K. Simmons is given too little to work with as the head of this secret agency, which also employs underwritten characters played by Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Alice Lee. One of the more moderately successful running jokes is that Mike’s undercover character is from Boston (get it?). A hulking English henchman even has a heart to heart with him about Good Will Hunting.

J.K. Simmons in The Union

Berry and Wahlberg are fine together, with an easy rapport, but zero chemistry. This would not be a problem if the movie wasn’t also trying to be a will-they-won’t-they romance between a woman who forgot her roots and a guy who needs to. I never quite bought into the idea that either of them are actually still thinking about their high school relationship and what went wrong. There’s been a lot of life in the interim to dwell on decisions you made at 17. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or even Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but maybe the story should have changed to suit these actors.

The Union movie poster

There’s just not enough there – action, comedy, romance, art – to demand (or, rather, earn) your full attention.

The Union, a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for sequences of strong violence, suggestive material, and some strong language. Running time: 107 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

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My Penguin Friend movie poster

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Jean Reno in My Penguin Friend

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Alien: Romulus movie poster

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Alien: Romulus movie still

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