“The Union,” an action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, should have been more fun. Or more exciting. There’s certainly a lot working in his favor, including big stars and a globetrotting budget. But it lacks a certain charm that could make it something more than the Netflix movie playing in the background.
“The Union,” streaming Friday, is a fairy tale — a very masculine story, about a middle-aged man (Wahlberg) whose life never quite began and who is recruited out of nowhere as a spy. Mike is a broke construction worker who still lives with his mother in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey (yes, there are Springsteen songs) and hangs out in bars with his old friends. His biggest win lately has been a one-night stand with his seventh-grade English teacher, and the only event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks. He’s the best man.
Which is to say, it comes as a relief to Mike when his old high school girlfriend Roxanne (Berry) walks into the bar one night looking like a punk rock superhero in a leather motorcycle jacket. Glamorous and confident and never bothered by the strand of hair getting into her eyes, she has clearly found a life outside of Patterson. The problem, or problem, I guess, is that we already know what she does. Instead of putting the audience in Mike’s shoes, as the fish out of water tries to figure out why he woke up in a luxury suite in London after meeting his high school ex at his hometown bar, ‘ The Union’ about Roxanne. It starts with a sort of ‘Mission: Impossible’-esque extraction going wrong in Trieste, Italy, where most of her team ends up dead. She decides they need some working-class courage to restart.
The idea for the film came from Stephen Levinson, Wahlberg’s long-time business partner, who together helped bring a new middle-grade Netflix action comedy to life in ‘Spenser Confidential’. It’s very factually directed by Julian Farino, a journeyman who directed many episodes of “Entourage,” and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there’s a kind of charming fantasy in the idea that anyone could be a moderately successful international spy, if given the chance and a few weeks of training. In the movies, women discover they are secret royalty and men discover they are secretly great spies.
But ‘The Union’ never quite falls into place in terms of tone. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, although I think it would prefer to be. JK Simmons is given too little to work with as the head of this secret service, which also employs underwritten characters played by Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Alice Lee. One of the more moderately successful running gags is that Mike’s undercover character is from Boston (get it?). A hulking English henchman even has a heart-to-heart with him on “Good Will Hunting.”
Berry and Wahlberg are great together, with an easy rapport but no chemistry. This wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t also want to be a will-they-won’t-they romance between a woman who forgot her roots and a man who needs them. I never quite bought into the idea that either of them is actually still thinking about their high school relationship and what went wrong. There’s been a lot of life in the meantime to dwell on the decisions you made at seventeen. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or even Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but perhaps the story in this case should have changed to serve the actors better.
That’s a nitpick for something with much bigger problems. And ultimately, “The Union” suffers the fate of many expensive streaming films before it: There’s just not enough — action, comedy, romance, art — to demand (or rather deserve) your full attention.
“The Union,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “sequences of strong violence, suggestive material and some strong language.” Running time: 107 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
