“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 its 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 7th grade English teacher and the only event on his agenda is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks where he is 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. Glamorous and confident, she has clearly found a life outside of Patterson. The problem, or a 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.
The idea came from Wahlberg’s longtime business partner Stephen Levinson, who together helped bring a new Netflix action comedy to life in ‘Spenser Confidential.’ And it was very fundamentally directed by Julian Farino, a journeyman director who directed many episodes of “Entourage,” and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there’s a kind of charming fantasy about the idea that anyone could be an 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.
‘The Union’ never quite comes into place in terms of sound. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, but I guess it would 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 about “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 should have changed to suit these actors.
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.
