You will know where you are early on when one member of the undercover espionage team reports back to base from “Trieste, Italy”. Was there really a chance they’d mistakenly gone to the one in Wyoming?
This is another of those bland, superficially lavish thrillers that Netflix pumps out at the end of summer for those too dehydrated to reach the pause button. Lots of travel. Lots of explosions. Someone actually saying “S**t, we got company!” All interiors shot in the unexciting light that, if included on a Dulux colour wheel, would be listed as “Netflix Drab”. Last year there was that awful faux-Mission: Impossible thing with Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan. This year, Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg (gawd bless ’em) go up against an obscure international cabal in the hunt for a vital slab of “intel”.
The high concept, though nicely egalitarian, is so feeble that even an old hand like JK Simmons has trouble getting it out without sighing. The Union (significantly named) is a subclandestine arm of US security that recruits from ordinary blue-collar workers. A man who has proved himself as a welder or a janitor is, they argue, more useful than some blazer with an Oxford rowing blue. We know that Mark Wahlberg is working class because the film plays Bruce Springsteen’s The Promised Land as he drives to his job in New Jersey. One odd day, Berry, an old flame who has become a Union operative, arrives to recruit him to the organisation. With implausible haste (even for something this silly) he signs up for action.
The only distinguishing feature of this exhilaratingly bad film is its apparent close association with London’s tourism authorities. The Union is based in the BT Tower. Later they make a trip to Seven Dials in Soho, the Albert Bridge, Tower Bridge, the Royal Albert Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. No, they don’t dance with beefeaters, but Wahlberg really does appear on stage during a matinee performance of Matilda. The collaboration only falters when somebody pronounces “Southwark” to rhyme with “South Fork”.
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All of which offers some diversion from a plot that contains fewer working parts than a hammer. Its only purpose is to get us to an ending open enough to permit sequels. The Union goes to Madame Tussauds. The Union feeds the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Don’t laugh. It could happen.
