THE UNION

Posted 5:30 AM by Gerald So

After failing to retrieve a stolen cache of spy identities, Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry) recruits her high school flame Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg) to help her buy the cache at a black market auction.

I was considerably against watching THE UNION after Wahlberg's stinging 2020 Spenser reimagining. Then I read a positive review and thought why not? He'd be playing a character to whom I had no attachment, and I like Halle Berry. The movie also features J.K. Simmons, Mike Colter, Jackie Earle Haley, Dana Delany, and Lorraine Bracco as characters whose most distinctive qualities are the names playing them.

The movie feels action-heavy, character-light, yet long enough I wondered why time wasn't spent on character. If it had been, I might have cared more about the people possibly being villains, being doublecrossed and killed. On the other hand, if the movie had been twenty minutes shorter, I might've liked it as a breezy romp.

As it is, I think I happened upon the one positive review and it misled me. Despite Wahlberg I didn't hate THE UNION, but it doesn't stand out in the pack of PG-13 B-spy flicks or in Wahlberg's or Berry's bodies of work.


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