The Union
Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry team up for a good-natured spy caper in which the future of a secret organisation is threatened with more twists than Spaghetti Junction.
Mission: Improbable: Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry
Photo by Laura Radford, Image courtesy of Netflix
Mike McKenna is a blue-collar construction worker living with his mom and hanging out with the same friends he knew from high school. He’s living in the same house, is having an affair with his seventh grade English teacher (Dana Delany) and hangs out in the same bar with his mates. His mom (Lorraine Bracco) knows him like the back of her hand and can hear the look on his face with her eyes closed. In fact, Mike McKenna is a New Jersey nobody and is a perfect candidate to join the Union.
Julian Farino’s The Union is so daft it’s almost irresistible. Mike wakes up in The Savoy hotel in London and asks his former sweetheart, now squeezed into a tight-fitting black ensemble, “where did Jersey go?” The Union is one of those secret organisations popular in spy fiction that operates beneath the radar because the CIA and FBI just aren’t up to the job. A mission in Italy has gone bass-ackwards and they need somebody off-grid, a nobody, but also somebody who looks like a granite escarpment with his shirt off, like Mark Wahlberg. So it’s up to Mike’s old sweetheart, Roxanne (Halle Berry), to reel him in and push him through an intensive two-week training course to turn him into a superspy to combat the Russians (or is it the Iranians?).
The Union aims to please and is aware of is own absurdities, but it makes the most of its artistic limitations. It has two ace cards: the freewheeling rapport between Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry and the sensational location work. The stuntwork feels largely grounded in this world, and therefore more credible than the flights of fancy delivered by bigger hitters like Fast & Furious and Mission: Impossible. In fact, this is strictly Mission: Impossible-lite, perfect for a Saturday night in the living room with the volume cranked up. You won’t remember it in two weeks’ time, but it should leave you with a smile on your face. Mark Wahlberg has cornered the market in forgettable, lightweight capers, partly because there’s an air of the Joe Blow about him – the blue-collar ordinary man – and partly because he doesn’t seem to have aged in thirty years. The same could be said for Halle Berry, who remains a sex goddess behind the wheel of any vehicle you can throw at her, and yet turns sixty next year. She is unreal.
The other star of The Union is Marjan Lopuh, the location coordinator, who has converted the recognisable backstreets of London into a shooting range and race track. Tourists might not notice the difference, but these are real streets transformed into a stuntman’s playground, where the BT Tower – hiding in plain sight – is the HQ for The Union and where a matinee performance of Matilda (at the Cambridge Theatre) is the scene for a cuticle-chewing chase sequence. Cue the real newscaster Fiona Bruce reporting on the subsequent carnage and The Union appears to be rampaging through a facsimile of the real world. It’s still bubblegum entertainment, but in the hands of the TV director Julian Farino it never pretends to be anything more than a pleasingly ludicrous distraction.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Halle Berry, Mike Colter, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica De Gouw, Alice Lee, Jackie Earle Haley, J. K. Simmons, Lorraine Bracco, Dana Delany, Patch Darragh, James McMenamin, Juan Carlos Hernandez, Stephen Campbell Moore, Cory English, Fiona Bruce.
Dir Julian Farino, Pro Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Jeff Waxman, Screenplay Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, Ph Alan Stewart, Pro Des Morgan Kennedy, Ed Pia Di Ciaula, Music Rupert Gregson-Williams, Costumes Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, Location Coordinator Marjan Lopuh.
Municipal Pictures-Netflix.
109 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 16 August 2024. Cert. 12.
