Number One on Netflix is a weekly spotlight on whatever is currently the most popular thing on the world’s most popular streaming service. Sometimes it’ll be a movie. Sometimes it’ll be a TV show. Whatever it is, a lot of people clearly watched it over the weekend, and on Monday mornings we’ll try to understand why with a quick review. First up: We review The Union, Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry’s spy-action-comedy.
Here’s a question for Netflix film executives: Exactly how many secret/underground spy/assassin/thief organizations do you think exist, really? 6 Underground, Gunpowder Milkshake, The Old Guard, The Gray Man, Heart of Stone… and now, The Union.
In many ways, this new weekly column is launching most auspiciously — because The Union, now comfortably dominating Netflix’s film charts, is the platonic ideal of the Netflix spy action movie, which has in recent years evolved into quite a robust subgenre. Its definitions include at least one blockbuster-level movie star, some CGI-enhanced action that doesn’t look too fake when you’re watching on your phone, some pretty international locations to look at, and an ending that promises further adventures to come… Maybe. If the algorithm is feeling generous, that is.
The Union begins by borrowing from the same playbook Brian de Palma used for the first Mission: Impossible movie, as high-level secret agent Roxanne (Halle Berry) watches an operation go bad and her team get killed. Not only that, but the asset her team lost was a database of every single law enforcement officer out there (not not the NOC list), which means that in order to find an operative who can go undercover to retrieve it, she has to look outside the normal realm of spy.
So, she recruits her high school sweetheart Mike (Mark Wahlberg), who never left Jersey after graduation and seems to be having a pretty nice life as an unmarried man in his late 40s who lives with his mother and works construction. He’s introduced during an awkward morning-after with the woman who was once his seventh-grade English teacher (played by Dana Delaney, so, congrats to everyone involved there). When he goes to work, swear to god Bruce Springsteen’s “Promised Land” is the needle drop chosen to accompany scenes of blue-collar men doing good, honest blue-collar work. Mike’s a good guy — and more importantly, he’s a union man.
That’s not why the movie is called The Union, though: The Union is actually the name for the secret spy agency Roxanne belongs to, which we are told is a group made up of the people who do the “real work” of keeping the world safe. The Union’s ethos as an organization leans heavily on “working class people are the true heroes” vibes — though its agents stay at five-star hotels and fly first class and work out of a very fancy office building in London.
The whole “union” thing is messy as hell, an unnecessarily complicated gimmick to add. (Fun fact: My aunt and uncle — both of whom are actual union members! — watched The Union this weekend. They repeatedly used the words “so dumb” to describe it afterwards.) This is especially true because the core narrative actually feels like more than enough of a premise to sustain a movie: An ordinary guy getting recruited as a spy by his first love? Just focus on that! Especially because Wahlberg and Berry do have decent chemistry, and the movie’s best moments come from them reflecting on their shared history.
As someone who directed 23 episodes of Entourage and 17 episodes of Ballers, Julian Farino at least knows a little bit about how to balance egos, which is good news because this is a stacked cast. Just look at their acting awards history:
- Mark Wahlberg: 1 Oscar nomination (The Departed)
- Halle Berry: 1 Oscar win (Monster’s Ball), 2 Emmy nominations and one win
- J.K. Simmons: 1 Oscar win (Whiplash), 1 Oscar nomination (Being the Ricardos)
- Jackie Earle Haley: 1 Oscar nomination (Little Children)
- Dana Delaney: 5-time Emmy nominee and 2-time winner
- Lorraine Bracco: 1 Oscar nomination (Goodfellas)
That’s right, this is the kind of movie where Oscar nominee Lorraine Bracco got two days of work playing Mark Wahlberg’s mother. (There is a 16-year age difference between the two actors, though that’s a gap a classic WB series would consider perfectly respectable.) None of these actors really get a chance to demonstrate the range and talent that led them to such critical acclaim in the context of this film. But Halle Berry’s rooftop-action skills have improved dramatically since 2004’s Catwoman.
I’ve definitely seen worse versions of this movie; a few gags and bits made me chuckle, and it is at least competently edited (unlike The Gray Man). With more nuance and focus, it might have aspired to greater heights. Unfortunately, by trying to do too much at once, the results get muddled, especially when it also suffers from the same predictable cliches found in so many other movies of this genre. Would you believe that there’s a mole inside the organization? Whoops, spoilers.
The Union (Netflix)
Really, there are so many of these fictional (so we think) operating-off-the-books-to-get-results-except-usually-there-is-a-mole-on-the-inside groups in Netflix movies, you’d think these spies would start running into each other more often. It happened to Netflix’s Christmas royalty movies, after all. However, as mentioned, one of this subgenre’s trademarks is the wildly overpowered casts — you can only drag actors like Wahlberg and Berry away from their busy schedules of 3:40 a.m. workouts and advocating for women’s health issues for a limited period of time.
And that’s often the crux of the Netflix original movie’s primary appeal: We now live in an era where films become blockbusters because of recognizable brands, not because the leads are famous movie stars. So there’s something kind of nice about the way Netflix still banks on viewers at home choosing to click on the thumbnail image that has two pretty famous pretty faces on it. And it worked for them… for at least this one weekend. Next week, something new may be number one. The streaming era circle of life.
The Union is streaming now on Netflix.