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The Union is the name for the secret organisation that’s more secret than the FBI, even when they’re running around the streets of our capital city, all guns blazing.
Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry – Moonfall) leads a team to extract a particular man, but it goes tits up, leading to the baddies snatching a briefcase containing something secret and expensive, etc.
Meanwhile, her ex, Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg – Mile 22), is out chasing GILFs, namely former English teacher Nicole (Dana Delany – Tulsa King). Our two leads know each other from way back, but she pops up out of the blue and kidnaps him, taking him all the way to London where she works with Tom Brennan (JK Simmons – Spider-Man: No Way Home More Fun Stuff Version), and Mike is now about to be the new guy in town, trained up as a secret agent, and given a new identity, leading to running around fast, even interrupting a production of Matilda.
On the plus side, as a big fan of prison drama Oz when it was broadcast, it was nice to see Vern Schillinger (Simmons) reunited with Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, as Union member Frank Preiffer).
On the downside, everyone’s rather phoning it in, and/or doesn’t get a huge amount to do aside from Berry and Wahlberg who hog most of the limelight. The only one I want to see a lot of is Alice Lee (Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams: Safe and Sound), as team member on comms, Athena. She’s lovely.
The team’s first job is to pick up an auctioneer device in exchange for $5m cash, but don’t worry about the plot as it always just leads to lots of driving around at speed, plus some more running. In the end, it just gets rather twisty-turny at times, and is all incredibly predictable in how it plays out.
But don’t stop there, as The Union also brings us clichés and bad acting from start to finish, including lots of shooting of guns in the residential streets of Istria… as if no-one would come out of their houses?!
(Well, Slovenia doubling for Istria, but anyway.)
This kind of film also makes me wonder how old were the big stars of the day when I was a kid, since I watch this one, and you have the pair jumping and running about across rooftops as if they’re teenagers, yet Wahlberg is 53, and Berry is 58. And when I was a kid, men in their ’50s had beer bellies, while the women had blue rinse hairdos.
As an aside, at one point, Halle uses binoculars while still wearing her sunglasses. Erm… no, you’d lift those up as you need to squint through them. Yes, that’s how gripping I found the plot.
Thanks to our friends at Netflix for the screener prior to release.
The Union is on Netflix from today, now, but isn’t yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD.
Check out the trailer below:
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 107 minutes
Release date: August 15th 2024
Studio: Netflix
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Score: 2/10
Director: Julian Farino
Producers: Stephen Levinson, Mark Wahlberg, Jeff G Waxman
Screenplay: Joe Barton, David Guggenheim
Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams
Cast:
Mike McKenna: Mark Wahlberg
Roxanne Hall: Halle Berry
Tom Brennan: JK Simmons
Nick Faraday: Mike Colter
Athena Kim: Alice Lee
Juliet Quinn: Jessica De Gouw
Frank Preiffer: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Foreman: Jackie Earle Haley
Nicole: Dana Delany
Eilas Schiller: Lucy Cork
Bobby Breslin: Patch Darragh
Johnny Healy: James McMenamin
Billy Lewis: Juan Carlos Hernández
Cameron Foster: Stephen Campbell Moore
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.