“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 now, 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, 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 (Berry), 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 Trieste, Italy, where most of her team ends up dead.
“The Union” never quite hits its stride tonally. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, but 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. 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 the story should have changed to suit these actors. There’s just not enough there — action, comedy, romance, art — to demand (or, rather, earn) your full attention..
