The Union premeires August 16 on Netflix. “All dressed up with nowhere to go is” an apt description for The Union, a shamefully safe, terribly unclever action-caper starring Mark Wahlberg as a flighty construction worker and Halle Berry as his former high school flame who now works for a secret spy agency. Rather than provide genuine laughs or palpable thrills, The Union instead checks off boxes, unspooling a bland, predictable movie while wasting its stars, budget, and foreign locations.
The fact that this forgettable flub filmed in the streets of England and Italy is a testament to Netflix's drive to to overpay for fugazis while producing empty-calorie entertainment fit for falling asleep to. No one's necessarily off their game here. Wahlberg is sufficient as a fish out of water, Berry is good as a kickass blast from his past that shakes up his life, and J.
K. Simmons, you know, does his thing. Its problem is more that it has virtually nothing to offer that we haven’t seen done far better a hundred times before, and it’s presented obnoxiously.
In recent years, the meme-o-verse has taken the MCU to task for what many feel is cut-and-paste, "He's right behind me, isn't he?" humor, but The Union is truly the epitome of that low-hanging banter trend. It even comes with a, "He's so broke, he can't pay attention" line, which is a quip from ( at least ) 50 years ago. Oh, and don't worry: someone also says, "I guess we should call this the REunion" when highlighting Wahlberg.