Ah, yes, another super secret agency so super and so secret replete with such super secrety agency goodness that no one knows about them including the FBI and CIA … and they’re so super and so secret that the extraction job in the opening is so botched so badly that only Halle Barry remains.
Huh, that must have been an inside job.
Oh, the movie doesn’t figure that out for another hour.
Sorry, movie. I hate to spoil the surprise, but you’d think that at least the movie would know, huh?
:SMH:
Roxanne Hall (Berry) is a member of The Union, a group of super spies. And their job was to collect a stolen database of all good guy spies in all agencies everywhere. OK, that’s a bad plot. A really bad plot. First cuz it was the plot of Mission: Impossible, second because nobody would or could compile such a list. You think personnel database information is shared among agencies? Good luck with that thesis.
Oh, but it gets worse. Much, much worse.
You see, because there’s an agency list floating around, the agents on the list are suddenly recognizable and, thus, powerless. (I’ll come back to this point) Hence, Roxanne recruits the guy she used to sleep with in high school, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), to be part of a list retrieval team.
:SMH:
Oh my. This is a plot from Hell. Let’s start here: the list only has value if it is opened and shared. If it hasn’t yet been opened and shared, all the agents on it remain anonymous. You see that, right? So they’re NOT all immediately compromised. That said, every.single.agent on the entire list has an interest in protecting that information. You see that, right? Hence, every.single.agent on the list is recruitable for information retrieval, you dig? There should be nothing but agents after that list, and instead, we get Mike, an unmarried middle-aged construction worker from Jersey currently living with his mom and sleeping with his old English teacher.
:SMH:
OK, so let’s pretend this is a reasonable plot just so we can move on. Roxanne befriends Mike (“blast from the past”) then drugs and kidnaps him. Mike wakes up in London. Why does he have to be in London? Where he is immediately trained in the art of spydom, and a nice montage
gets us from “rank amateur” to “passable” in about 60 seconds. Then the film gets to play with super spy Roxanne and rookie spy Mike in a partnership, which is probably exactly what you would expect that to look like.
Is it fun? Shrug. A moderate amount, I guess.
Is it exciting? Shrug. A moderate amount, I guess.
Is it believable? Let me count the ways it ain’t.
Sometimes Marky Mark plays a pedestrian guy with special skillz and sometimes he plays a pedestrian guy with no special skillz. Know how you can tell it’s the latter? By how little time he spent in makeup. For instance, in The Union, Mark Wahlberg has terrible scrabbly facial hair and Supercuts #3 on top. When the stylist doesn’t care, it means Marky Mark is a member of the bum bunch.
As for Halle, well, hey, she looks fantastic at age 58. Stunning. Gorgeous. OK. Great. But she’s now at that stage where Liam Neeson and Robert DeNiro are where she needs to stop doing action films. I don’t doubt she’s in wonderful shape and can roll with the best of her peers. The problem is that -like Neeson and DeNiro- her blows are no longer solid. At this point, a competent stunt double or sparring partner is needed to make her look believable … and sometimes, it just isn’t happening.
The Union is among the many action films you could see having a sequel were it good. There won’t be a second Union; I’m afraid all courtship desire was killed after the divorce.
There once was a meathead named Mike
Who went from townie to superspy, psych!
With a plot this obscene
Don’t expect to feel clean
All I can say is we’re all tainted alike
Rated PG-13, 107 Minutes
Director: Julian Farino
Writer: Joe Barton, David Guggenheim
Genre: Stupid plots
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Do you enjoy mindless entertainment?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who think
