‘The Union’ (2024) Review – A Been There, Done That, Recycled Action Picture

Good God, why do we put up with movies like The Union? I call this new Netflix series of films the “We Don’t Respect Our Audience, So We Will Stream Anything We Want Because You Are Too Afraid to Say Anything Since We May Keep Raising Your Subscription Prices” genre. Moronic action film buffoonery like Lift, Atlas, and Trigger Warning not only offers very little originality but also poorly steals from better films without competence.

My apologies to the new Prime Video film Jackpot!. That John Cena effort is a masterpiece in comparison. The Union is tediously clichéd, mind-numbingly boring, and the script lacks so much motivation that I would call it sloth-like if that weren’t an insult to xenarthran mammals everywhere.

The Union’s ridiculous premise starts with an operation gone wrong, directly ripped from the first entry in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible franchise, which should make David Koepp cry plagiarism. Halle Berry plays Roxanne, a member of the secret elite government-funded agency known simply as The Union. She leads the team and is supervised by her boss, Thomas Brennan (J.K. Simmons). However, their latest operation goes wrong.

Roxanne and Brennan watch as a rogue terrorist association picks off and kills their entire team, including Roxanne’s operational leader, Nick (Evil’s Mike Colter), after he abducts an asset trying to sell government secrets. Honestly, Joe Barton (The Ritual) and David Guggenheim (Safe House) make the script so painfully predictable from the opening sequence that it worsens an already bad movie.

How? That’s because it takes away any suspense the film could possibly generate. On top of that, you have the issue of the Mark Wahlberg character, Mike. He is Roxanne’s high school sweetheart from the tri-state area, and she hasn’t seen him in almost 25 years. What is Roxanne’s solution a day or two after the mission goes haywire? She brings in her ex-boyfriend because he was once a reliable figure in her life.

I bet you are thinking Mike must be a police officer back on the force, right? No. Maybe even a dirty cop, fired and looking to redirect a life lived incorrectly? Nope. Well, he must be a current officer in the military. Or at least someone with a background in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry? Nada. No, Mike is a lifelong construction worker without any experience in law enforcement, the military, or spy operations.

Well, I guess he could kill a Russian spy with a nail gun, a whistle, or, you know, gumption. He must have succeeded because he receives no more than what seems like 48 hours of training, yet he can hold his own. That’s The Union, an example of a studio making a movie hoping that you relate to the “everyman” character who can do anything you can relate to on the silver screen.

The problem is this is not the Bradly Cooper film Limitless. In fact, the main character is limited. The script doesn’t even have fun with the fact he is a fish out of water character.

Director Julian Farino’s (Entourage) film is one of the worst of the year, and the cast is sleepwalking through their roles. The audience accepts this kind of laziness but refuses to realize they hold the power by canceling their subscription. As a subscriber, you need to demand better from the streaming giant because you pay for a monthly premium service.

The power is in our hands, yet we keep letting streamers like Netflix recycle the same garbage almost weekly. This is paint-by-numbers filmmaking that gives streaming services a bad name. Email your provider, dig deep, channel your best Howard Beale impression, and tell them, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

You probably won’t, but that means you don’t have the right to complain about movies like The Union later.

You can stream the new Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg film The Union on August 16th. 

What did you think of the Netflix film? Let us know in the comment section below!