‘The Union’ Review: Mark Wahlberg Is the Only Guy Normal Enough to Join the Government’s Top Secret Department of Normal Guys
Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry) is a globetrotting superspy who executes intricate missions without breaking a sweat. Need to kidnap a billionaire crime lord from a heavily guarded hotel room without disturbing the other guests? She’s your woman. Is the world order as we know it threatening to collapse due to an unprecedented intelligence leak? She’s the one you call. So when Roxanne is faced with the most important mission of her career, it’s somewhat surprising that she decides to bring in extra help. What’s even more surprising is that her preferred phone-a-friend is her old boyfriend, who has never left his hometown or shown the slightest bit of interest in (or talent for) fighting crime.
When we first meet Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg who, one imagines, must get first dibs on every script about a construction worker who’s called to save the world), he’s waking up after a one-night-stand with his 7th grade English teacher. For those curious, it’s revealed they had sex “one and a half times.” When she kicks him out of bed, he goes about his day in the exact same way he has for the past 30 years. He heads to the construction site, laughs with his blue collar buddies while donning his hard hat and neon vest, lifts heavy metal beams, eats lunch on top of a work-in-progress skyscraper, and then blows off steam shooting pool at a local dive bar.
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The montage is confusingly set to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land” — a certified banger, but one whose lyrics about taking a knife to cut the pain from your heart don’t quite align with the carefree male bonding shown on screen. But he’s a working class guy, and working class guys like Springsteen, so we’re not supposed to question it.
Mike receives an unexpected break from the monotony when Roxanne walks into the bar looking for him. His high school sweetheart initially seems interested in playing a few games of pool and reminiscing about their Glory Days of making out to The Boss’ cover of “Jersey Girl,” but it isn’t long before she tranquilizes him and jets him off to London in his sleep. When Mike wakes up across the pond, he’s informed that he has been recruited to join the U.S. government’s most elite and secretive intelligence agency: The Union.
As it turns out, the United States’ government has formally recognized that all of the Ivy Leaguers in the FBI and CIA were too soft and incompetent to solve the world’s problems, so it’s decided to bring in blue collar union members to do the real work of fighting international terrorism. The Union is comprised entirely of Average Joes who worked in factories, loading docks, construction sites, and other places that keep the world running with good, old-fashioned elbow grease. These tough-as-nails men and women were all handpicked for being smarter than their corporate fat cat bosses, and have been enlisted to apply their street smarts and work ethics to the world’s most sensitive counterintelligence missions.
Even by the standards of a direct-to-Netflix movie starring Mark Wahlberg released in 2024, “The Union” is utterly asinine. Despite the fact that Mike was never shown to be particularly good at his construction job, he’s thrust into a six-week training program before teaming up with Roxanne to track down a briefcase containing endless amounts of stolen global intelligence secrets. And this may come as a shock, but Mike’s lumbering American ways make him a fish-out-of water in London — though Roxanne is eventually charmed by his earnestness and remembers why she loved him in the first place.
But even if the film’s ridiculous premise is at least chuckle-inducing — and sold rather convincingly by a cast that all seems to be on the same page about how stupid it is — its convoluted MacGuffin and predictable twists ensure that no amount of expensive action sequences from director Julian Farino or genuine chemistry between Wahlberg and Berry can elevate “The Union” into something worth watching.
It’s easy to envision a world where this nonsense dominates Netflix’s streaming charts for months on end, but its success will have more to do with millions of people hating their own bosses than any storytelling achievement.
Grade: C
“The Union” begins streaming on Netflix on Friday, August 16.
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