, newest original feature film starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, is sort of like the Wahlburger of spy romps. At the risk of sounding contemptuous, watching Wahlberg and Berry waste their considerable talent on a with a mediocre plot that no one, and I mean no one, will remember or talk about a month from now feels, I don’t know, like paying $16 for a mid hamburger. The movie, from director Julian Farino, stars Wahlberg as a broke, middle-aged schlub who works in construction, who’s never left his New Jersey hometown, and by the end of the movie gets to play superspy for a little while.
Suffice it to say, this thing has fallen completely flat with both critics and fans (it’s got a 44% and 30%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). And, of course, it’s the #1 movie on Netflix at the moment, because ..
. well, because more often than not the major streamers are simply unbound and unbothered by the constraints of our fleeting reality. While you and I have to work hard to prove our worth every day to our superiors, too many streaming TV shows and movies get to exist for no other reason than because somebody woke up one day and decided it should be so.
“Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a down-to-earth construction worker from Jersey, is quickly thrust into the world of super spies and secret agents when his high school sweetheart Roxanne (Halle Berry) recruits him on a high-stakes US intelligence mission,” Netflix’s logline explains. Which is a reminder tha.