“The Union,” an action comedy with Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, should have been more fun. Or more exciting. It certainly had a lot working in its favor, including big stars and a budget for globetrotting. But it’s lacking a certain charm that could help it be something more than the Netflix movie playing in the background.
“ The Union,” streaming Friday, is a fairy tale — a very male one, about a middle-aged everyman (Wahlberg) whose life never quite got started and who gets recruited to be a spy out of the blue. Mike is a broke construction worker still living in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey (yes, there are Springsteen songs) with his mother and hanging with his old friends in bars. His biggest win of late was a one-night stand with his seventh grade English teacher and the one event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks. He’s the best man.
That’s all to say that for Mike, it is a breath of fresh air when his old high school girlfriend Roxanne (Berry), walks into the bar one evening looking like a punk-rock superhero in a leather motorcycle jacket. Glamorous and confident and never bothered by the flop of hair getting in her eyes, she has clearly found a life outside Patterson. The problem, or a problem, I think, is that we already know what she does. Instead of putting the audience in Mike’s shoes, as the fish out of water trying to figure out why he’s woken up in a luxury suite in London after meeting his high school ex in his hometown bar, “The Union” starts on Roxanne. It begins with a kind of “Mission: Impossible”-style extraction gone wrong, in Trieste, Italy, where most of her team ends up dead. She decides that they need some working class grit to reboot.
The idea for the movie came from Stephen Levinson, Wahlberg’s longtime business partner, who together helped bring another middle-of-the-road Netflix action-comedy to life in “Spenser Confidential.” It’s directed very basically by Julian Farino, a journeyman who helmed many episodes of “Entourage,” and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there is a sort of charming fantasy about the notion that anyone could be a moderately successful international spy given the opportunity and a few weeks of training. In the movies, women get to find out they’re secret royalty and men get to find out they’re secretly great spies.
But “The Union” never quite hits its stride tonally. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, though I think that’s what it would prefer to be. J.K. Simmons is given too little to work with as the head of this secret agency, which also employs underwritten characters played by Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Alice Lee. One of the more moderately successful running jokes 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 fine together, with an easy rapport, but zero chemistry. This would not be problem if the movie wasn’t also trying to be a will-they-won’t-they romance between a woman who forgot her roots and a guy who needs to. I never quite bought into the idea that either of them are actually still thinking about their high school relationship and what went wrong. There’s been a lot of life in the interim to dwell on decisions you made at 17. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or even Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but maybe in this case the story should have changed to serve its actors better.
That’s a nitpick for something with much larger problems. And ultimately “The Union” suffers the fate of many high-priced streaming movies before it: There’s just not enough there — action, comedy, romance, art — to demand (or, rather, earn) 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.
