Mark Wahlberg's 'The Union' suggests action films have reached peak earpiece.
We does every setpiece feel like a Zoom call now?
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I’m not sure at what point the conventions of the espionage action movie (or the espionage action-comedy) solidified into a set of ironclad diktats, but it was clearly long before this week’s Netflix release of The Union, starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry. Wahlberg and Berry, who have apparently been friends for 30 years but never did a movie together before now, perform their little riff on Mr. and Mrs. Smith as ex-high school sweethearts reunited after Berry’s character recruits Wahlberg’s to her secretive intelligence agency (“the Union”). And from this high-concept, movie executive alchemy, an actual movie very nearly breaks out.
Only it can’t, because Bourne movies and the operator culture they spawned are just too specific a lifestyle brand to allow for anything truly spontaneous. This is the action movie on rails. Indeed, it seems impossible for modern screenwriters to imagine a gunfight that doesn’t involve a small group of commandos wearing ballcaps holding submachine guns talking to each other on invisible earpieces. “Look sharp, boys, we’ve got company!” and so forth.
Are our imaginations really so cooked that it’s impossible to conceive of a gunfight or hostage extraction situation that doesn’t play out with Waze step-by-step navigation in the hero’s ear? Why does every action setpiece feel like a corporate Zoom call these days? Everything is so excruciatingly rote, from the double taps to the head to the tone of detached insouciance with which it’s carried out.
The Union opens with Halle Berry’s character, Roxanne, wearing some sort of baffling slouch hat, narrating just such an operation while leaned against a doorframe somewhere. “Welcome to beautiful Trieste, Italy, where we have a rogue CIA operative currently holed up in room 320 of the Hotel Castellatto…” Berry narrates unconvincingly to an audience of multiple security agency teams in different shadowy control rooms.
She’s giving us the setting and the situation, but if you’ve seen any forgettable big-budget action movie in the last 15 years (anything from The Gray Man to a Fast/Furious movie) you can imagine the rest of the scene, down its most granular detail. Athletically brusque commandos in vests and hats moving through narrow corridors saying “clear,” a control room with a massive bank of monitors presided over by guy with grey hair, a nerdy type in a van somewhere else doing computer stuff, with all of them trading quips and barbs over invisible earpieces and generally creating the impression that people in the intelligence services can play each other like a first-person video game. Meanwhile, where is she standing? Are there no passersby wondering why an American lady with a whoopie cushion on her head keeps smugly narrating reality to no one in particular?
These are the questions one is not meant to ask of a movie like The Union, which treats all these operator fiction tropes like an unalterable plot skeleton. It’s only within these unbendable bones that the individual creator can flesh out this material, through banter and winking dialogue geared to the particular actors. The videogame is the same, only the influencers narrating the action change.
Anyway, the “operation” goes awry, the rogue agent escapes, and every field agent save Roxanne gets killed, including one played by an actor you just know is too noteworthy to warrant only 90 seconds of screen time.
Smash cut to Mark Wahlberg’s character in a bar somewhere drinking beer and wisecracking with his buddies and generally being the human embodiment of plaid flannel. That somewhere, it turns out, is Paterson, New Jersey, where Mike McKenna (Wahlberg) is a salt-of-the-Earth construction worker who drives a beat-up pick-up truck and lives with his overbearing mom (the divine Lorraine Bracco from The Sopranos). Cue the flag fluttering, blue collar work montage, set to a Bruce Springsteen needle drop, the sonic equivalent of a narrator bellowing THE CHARACTERS IN THIS MOVIE ARE FROM NEW JERSEY.
When we catch up to him, Mike has just woken up next to his seventh grade English teacher, played by Dana Delany (who is actually just old enough to have been Wahlberg’s teacher, though she doesn’t look it). Bracco, Delany, and almost the entire supporting cast of The Union are welcome faces, and much of the banter actually works; just not quite enough to revive this essentially dead material.
Roxanne shows up at Mike’s bar unexpectedly one night, all flirtatious banter and videogame-avatar-ready motorcycle jacket. For some reason, she’s still narrating all of this to her handler, played by JK Simmons. If you took a shot every time a Union character pointlessly narrated the action to someone offscreen you might die.
“This is so crazy, I pictured you walking through that door a thousand times,” says a stunned Mike.
“Is it as you imagined?” Roxanne purrs.
“I dunno, in my head you were always wearing a bikini,” Mike flirts, in the scene that functions as the sizzle reel in Netflix’s featured content row.
The two do have an affable chemistry, if a mostly chaste one. Roxanne plays Mike for the horny fool he is, pretend bonding over another Springsteen song (THIS IS NEW JERSEY, DO NOT FORGET) before sticking him in the neck with some kind of sedative and kidnapping him to London. Mike actually tumbles violently down a hill after getting stuck with the needle, a successful bit of slapstick that actually made me chuckle out loud. It’s as if director Julian Farino has a genuine facility for shooting lively banter and competent slapstick, but wasn’t entrusted with input on any story element that might actually matter.
Turns out, Mike soon learns, Roxanne works for an intelligence outfit so secretive that neither Mike nor us has ever heard of it before. “The Union,” JK Simmons’ character explains, does the actual hard work of intelligence gathering, by recruiting salty Main Street types like Mike, while the fruity Ivy League college boys at the CIA, FBI, and MI6, with their expensive suits and fancy pedigrees, take all the credit. “We’re an invisible army that keeps the world running,” Simmons growls. “People who do the actual work. Street smarts over book smarts. Blue collar, not blue blood. People that build our cities, keep production lines humming.”
Say less! We get it, you’re the Wes Welkaah of intelligence agencies, bringing a lunch pail and succeeding on GRIT. This agency has recruited Mike, we learn, on account of he’s a largely empty vessel who has never left the Tristate Area.
An action movie that actually treated the CIA and FBI as the bands of overeducated fuckups they are, whose meddling based on false assumptions and the bespoke concerns of the ruling classes invariably end up creating more problems they fix would actually be a welcome thing. But it would probably surprise you not at all to learn that The Union is not interested in going there, or even close to it. Instead it invokes labor unions solely as a kind of lifestyle branding, contrasting the style of their intelligence work but not any of the actual assumptions underpinning it. Flannel shirts are better than black suits because REAL AMERICANS wear them! Grrr, Springsteen!
Mike has been tapped to help retrieve “a device” that contains “information about every man and woman who has ever served a Western-allied country,” Simmons explains. “Every local cop, every rifleman in the marines. Every spook at MI5, MI6… FBI, CIA, and, yeah, the Union. That intel gets into the wrong hands, our ability to protect the public is history.”
You want Al-Qaeda snipping your belt sander or sabotaging your lathe?? Didn’t think so, punk!
They have just one week and a few montages with which to train Mike up as a super spy. After that, he’ll have to go get the device back from the rogue hackers (I guess???) who have obtained it, which he will do at a secret auction where he’ll bidding against representatives from “China, Russia, Syria, North Korea, and Iceland,” the Union’s computer expert, played by Jackie Earle Haley, explains.
“Iceland?” asks the “Fangirl” character, played by a septum-pierced Alice Lee, who at one point says “Yaaas, queen” when Roxanne beats up a bad guy.
“Just kidding, Iran,” says Haley’s character. “It’s always Iran.”
Ooooh, you wascawy Iwanians! They’re always trying to mess with us for no good reason. I mean, it’s not like we overthrew their democratically elected leader to install a murderous Nepo Baby who ruled them with an iron fist or anything. And then financed a dictator next door who murdered their people with poison gas. And then deposed the gas guy ourselves but crippled them with economic sanctions anyway. Listen, I know I’m not meant to question the politics of a goofy spy comedy on Netflix (nor do I expect one to have good politics), but goofing on Iran like they’re a misbehaving child is a bit rich, even for a Mark Wahlberg vehicle. If you’re going to invoke geopolitics, at least sound like you mean it. Even if you’re a rightwing reactionary! At least make it feel like a choice.
The bigger issue is that none of the details of this device, who wants it, who’s selling it, how anyone gets it, or what they’re expected to do with it once they have it make any sense at all. The Union chases this device, which takes the form of a cell phone, all over the world. And then it turns out there are a bunch of these devices, and yet it’s never acknowledged why bad guys couldn’t just copy this intel and reproduce and disseminate it indefinitely.
In another scene, Wahlberg and Berry escape a rival security force by jumping off an overpass onto a barge passing under the bridge. One cut later, the pursuers are chasing the barge, while Wahlberg and Berry climb up a ladder on the bridge’s support beam with complete dry clothes. What the hell actually happened there?
There are a lot of these “yadda yadda, then some other stuff happens” moments in The Union, which smacks of a movie in which even the director wasn’t sold on and didn’t care about the details of its big spy plot.
Which is a shame, because Farino, his actors, editor Pia Di Ciaula, and his stunt team do a lot of things well that a lot of coarable action movie teams don’t. There’s a nifty little stunt in which Halle Berry ducks under an adversary’s arm, gets the bad girl’s back with seatbelt control, and then suplexes her onto her head and breaks her neck. Cool stunt! I actually felt that one. Much more so than the indistinguishable barrage of gun-fu and quick-cut thumpy fighting you normally see in action movies these days, which always prioritize quantity of kills over quality and generally bore me to tears.