The Union

Picturesque locations, good production values, some good actors and Mark Wahlberg, but nothing memorable. Perfect moving wallpaper to glance at occasionally while scrolling on your phone. Essentially it's a string of comfortable cliches strung together in a predictable sequence, designed to make you forget to cancel your Netflix subscription. Halle Berry looks better than ever, JK Simmons doesn't break a sweat using one of his 'grizzled' character templates.

The UK setting is puzzling because apart from the scenery it's almost wall-to-wall Americans doing American things in American ways. The Slovenian locations look beautiful but, again, they have no impact on the plot, which could easily have been generated by ChatGPT with a very short prompt.

Going into this action/comedy movie, I knew nothing about it and my expectation was extremely low. Maybe too low but I felt this movie started out OK. Things made sense but it went South (way South) very very quickly. Everything was sub-par ranging from action scenes to acting, and it was really getting painful to watch toward the end. There was no climax whatsoever. Thank God I was not watching this in the movie theater!

Unless you have watched everything on Netflix (which I was told simply impossible), please skip this one. You have not missed much and glad that you have followed my advice.

It has become painfully clear that Hollywood is short on good writing. This movie has a ton of story to work with but instead flushes it down the toilet. To be clear it is a stylish action flick, it looks really pretty and the action scenes are fun to watch. The problem however is that the flick has employed an impressive number of A-list actors and gave them poop scripts. The only person that had any decent lines was J. K. Simmons, all the rest of the cast was wasted on a doo-doo script. It wouldn't be out of place to say this has been done before, and a lot better than this. After the plot was explained it was painfully obvious they just copy and pasted bits and pieces from other espionage movies to get this stylish looking thing on screens. It's too bad really, the story could have been worked into something much better than what the end result was. This is a watch and make fun of it while it plays movie, that could have been so much more.

This movie is a candidate for Riff Trax or MST3K! One hour and forty plus minutes of Marky Mark being confused. You can play a drinking game for every time he asks a question or says $#it. 90% of his script is a question!

Decent production quality, shot well, generic soundtrack, ok action, but boy does the dialogue stink! Very cliche and unimaginative writing.

Characters are predictable and even the A list actors are hard to digest, it's just not very good and is background noise as I write this review.

So if you want to Netflix and chill, press play and commence to a couch party with your partner about 30 minutes in.

A truly awful film and a waste of a talented cast. The plot must have been written by AI. It had every cliched plot point you could imagine; the ordinary man becoming a hero; spy stuff; the beautiful ex-girlfriend; action; a foreign location. It wasn't even funny, just grim.i gritted my teal and slogged through it. I'd like to say that there were some interesting plot points that could have been done better it expanded upon, but that wasn't the case. I appreciate that companies such as Netflix need content to keep their subscribers happy, but the quality needs to be much better, even if it takes longer to produce.