Review: The Union
The Union, Netflix’s latest espionage action movie, doesn’t reach the heights of movies like Extraction but it is significantly better than truly forgettable dreck like Heart of Stone and is carried by the real-life friendship chemistry of Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry.
Wahlberg plays Mike McKenna, a regular blue-collar construction worker from Patterson, NJ. When his high school girlfriend, Roxanne Hall (Berry), comes back into his life, Mike is shocked to find himself pulled into the world of international espionage when he’s abducted to London and given the opportunity to train and join The Union, an independent intelligence agency that Roxanne works for. Needing someone fresh after their last mission was horribly compromised, Mike has to quickly learn the skills required to be a spy and help Roxanne and The Union get back a list of every spy and federal agent being auctioned to the highest bidder. The Union doesn’t really do anything new or clever, and there are twists that you’ll see coming from miles away if you’re even a casual action fan. A couple of twists subvert expectations, but this is primarily a by-the-books action/comedy that Netflix has been pumping out with stuff like Red Notice that is driven more by the algorithm than any clever writing or plot beats. It’s serviceable and mostly entertaining watching it, but you’ll probably forget most of it soon after seeing it.
One of the main things keeping the movie entertaining is Wahlberg and Berry, who leverage the fact that they’ve been friends in real life since the 80s to make their chemistry and character’s backstories seem believable and effortless. Their back and forth keeps the movie moving, even as they need to hit a lot of predictable beats, like getting mad at each other and then making up before the big third-act climax. One thing the movie weirdly glosses over is that Mike, who is supposed to be a regular ass Jersey guy, seems to be okay with killing and almost getting killed. His lack of reaction to him killing bad guys or seeing them killed in front of him has the perhaps unanticipated trade-off of making him seem like a bit of a psychopath. There seems like an opportunity to have Mike freak out more when things start escalating for comedic effect, but he seems weirdly fine with all of it after a week or two of training. The rest of the cast is fine but they don’t have that much interesting to do. J.K. Simmons plays the head of The Union and has a few solid J.K. Simmons style lines but disappears for large chunks of the movie, especially going into the third act. Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Alice Lee play The Union support team, but they don’t get to do anything particularly interesting or funny. There’s a particularly odd beat where the movie expects you to care about the fate of one of those characters, but since you barely even know who they are, it doesn’t have any impact.
The action is fairly solid throughout The Union, with a few clever bits, some solid hand-to-hand fights, shootouts, and car chases, especially a climactic car chase through the winding Italian roads with some drifting and clever maneuvering. Berry has a pretty cool fight with stuntwoman Lucy Cork, who plays a Russian assassin, which is also one of the movie’s highlights. Netflix set the bar for their action movies high with Extraction and Extraction 2, which compare more to movies like John Wick, but The Union‘s action is perfectly cromulent and entertaining.
On the scale of Netflix original action movies, The Union is definitely above something like Heart of Stone, a film you forget while actively watching, and probably right behind something like The Gray Man. If you’re a fan of Wahlberg and/or Berry, they carry the movie with their chemistry, and there’s enough decent action and banter to check it out if you’re scrolling through the Netflix app looking for something to watch.
