L ike a good covert operation team, everyone involved in the latest in a long line of expensive yet generally 🛡 forgettable Netflix action flicks is clear on the mission. They know their role, and what they're being paid for. Mark 🛡 Wahlberg, playing to type as a downhome blue-collar guy, enters the movie shirtless. Halle Berry, as a veteran intelligence agent, 🛡 kicks ass while wearing a Catwoman-esque all-leather uniform. JK Simmons, as the head of a covert group of working-class secret 🛡 agents (hence, the Union), conveys no-nonsense avuncular authority as only JK Simmons can. And Julian Farino, director of such shows 🛡 as Giri/Haji and Entourage, wrings each of the many combat scenes for snappy but never stressful suspense.
The fictional purpose, besides 🛡 a vague sense of justice, is never totally clear however. Nothing in The Union is subtle, including its hope that 🛡 the star power of Wahlberg and Berry will paper over a set-up that feels dubious even by silly caper standards. 🛡 Berry's Roxanne is a longtime operative for this secret federal agency (maybe?) of blue-collar workers that goes under the radar, 🛡 gets by on its unpretentious efficiency and disdains the CIA for its elitism. The film opens with the Union in 🛡 crisis, as a mission to extract a CIA defector in Trieste goes awry, leaving several agents dead, including Roxanne’s closest 🛡 partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter). For quickly stated reasons, a "nobody" is needed to complete the mission. Enter Wahlberg’s Mike, 🛡 Roxanne's high school sweetheart.
Mike has what Roxanne derisively calls a "small" life in the same old New Jersey home town. 🛡 He lives with his mom (Lorraine Bracco), is very close with his childhood friends, works in construction; and there's a 🛡 recurring bit about his recent dalliance with their seventh-grade English teacher. The script, by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, gives 🛡 suitable texture to Roxanne and Mike’s bond, but The Union benefits tremendously from its leads. Wahlberg and Berry, friends for 🛡 over 30 years (with some early 90s photos in the credits to back it up) have well-worn, warm chemistry from 🛡 the jump, and are convincing as two people still immediately able to rib – and charm – each other despite 🛡 not talking for 25 years. Of course he accepts being drugged and whisked to London, then participating in a potentially 🛡 lethal mission, if it means sticking with her.
Naturally, he's won over by the ethos of the union: little guys sticking 🛡 it to the big-moneyed evil ones (cartoonish Iranian terrorists, North Korean operatives, Russian spies, debonair Londoners). Or, as Simmons's director 🛡 Brennan puts it: "Street smarts over book smarts. Blue collar, not blue blood. People that build our cities, keep production 🛡 lines humming, that's who we are. We get shit done. 'Cause people like us are expected to get shit done, 🛡 'cause nobody ever handed us anything a day in our lives."
The murkily explained mission is to steal back government intel 🛡 on anyone who has served a western-allied country, kept in a comical Deal or No Deal briefcase, thus continuing to 🛡 protect the people. The inchoate class politics gives the film more than a whiff of pandering. That it still mostly 🛡 works is down to to Simmons and Wahlberg, both adept at playing winsome normal folk, and of course Berry as 🛡 a hyper-competent fighter straining to contain her emotional vulnerabilities.
For the vast majority of its 1 hour, 47-minute runtime, The Union 🛡 keeps up a pleasurable rhythm of information, mission, combat and flirting, through increasingly eye-rolling plot turns and a car chase 🛡 in Croatia that seems to last for ever. The mood is light, the stunts impressive and, mercifully, the film is 🛡 not nearly as cheap-looking nor dull as Netflix brethren such as The Man from Toronto or Lift.
The two stars often 🛡 come off more as exes turned friends than romantic interests. Spoiler alert: The Union is in the frustrating Twisters club 🛡 of denying audiences a kiss for no discernible reason, other than maybe holding out for a sequel. For all the 🛡 petrol, broken glass and stuntwork lavished on The Union, I can't confidently say it has enough juice for that, but 🛡 it at least rises above expectations.