“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 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, with his mother, hanging with his old friends in bars.
His biggest win of late was a one-night stand with his 7th grade English teacher and the one event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks where 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 , walks into the bar one evening looking like a punk rock superhero. Glamorous and confident, she has clearly found a life outside of 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 Triest.