You know, spy movies weren’t always wall-to-wall vacation porn. There was a time when a hero could go undercover and save the world, or at least some microfilm, without trotting all over the globe, trysting in fancy hotels, wrecking pricey cars and drinking top shelf booze. But thanks largely to the blockbuster films of James Bond, tales of subterfuge became synonymous with opulent power fantasies, where the hero is a suave and sophisticated sex god with an unlimited expense account.
Julian Farino’s “The Union” has a different premise. It’s about a secret organization called “The Union,” which, unlike the elitist and bureaucratic FBI and CIA, actually gets all the work done. They don’t recruit Ivy League graduates, they recruit blue collar workers — “Street smarts over book smarts.” In an era where the people running things don’t know how to make anything run, it’s a clever new fantasy that gives the people in the audience heroes we can actually relate to.
And then it flushes all that down the toilet by doing the same old super spy shtick.
Mark Wahlberg stars as Mike McKenna, a guy who never left his hometown and who repairs bridges for living. When his high school girlfriend, Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry), returns home all of a sudden, Mike thinks maybe they can rekindle their relationship. Instead she drugs him, drags him to London, and recruits him into The Union for a secret mission, where they will trot the globe, drive fancy cars, and do all the same stuff every other movie spy gets up to, premise of “The Union” be damned.
When I say “the same stuff every other movie spy gets up to,” I don’t just mean James Bond. I also mean Ethan Hunt in Brian de Palma’s “Mission: Impossible,” whose plot “The Union” recycles with distracting shamelessness. The film begins with a mission to retrieve a stolen list of secret agents that goes south, so every agent except the film’s biggest star dies. The film’s second biggest star (so far) even gets shot on a bridge and falls off of it, and is presumed dead. Does that sound familiar?
So Roxanne has to enlist a new teammate and retrieve the list, but wouldn’t you know it, there’s a mole in the organization, and Roxanne and Mike wind up on the run while other agencies try to hunt them down. “The Union” doesn’t revisit “Mission: Impossible’s” iconic set pieces, for what it’s worth, but it doesn’t replace them either. The film is packed with generic shootouts and chases until the film’s extended climax which, it must be said, features some impressive stuntwork. They saved the best for last. If only there was more of the best to spread around.
There are a few brief moments when these blue collar spies get to make the most of their specific skillsets, like using low-level connections in the shipping industry to sneak around the world. But they’ve got all the same high-tech headquarters and spy-tech gadgets, so for all the trouble the filmmakers are going through, Mike might as well have been recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. or U.N.C.L.E. or M.A.S.K. since The Union is functionally the same except without the cool acronym. (“The United National Intelligence Operations Network” was right there, damn it.)
Julian Farino directed 23 episodes of “Entourage,” so maybe that explains why “The Union” plays a bit like a fake movie those fake actors would have fake made. Or maybe it’s just the Netflix house style, another “Red Notice” or “Heart of Stone,” where everything’s bright and shiny and nothing seems terribly important. There’s a market for that, the kind of movie you can put on in the background, vaguely enjoy, and then forget about for the rest of your life. There was a time when you’d go to the video store late on Friday night, find the whole place picked over, and come home with whatever movie you could get. And if that film was “The Union,” you’d probably feel like it was money well spent.
Then again, “The Union” is on Netflix and there’s no shortage of other streaming films to watch instead. There’s nothing really to recommend “The Union” except the fact that it exists and you can watch it. It’s a harmless waste of time because it’s a serious waste of a good idea.
