The Union is another uninspired paint-by-numbers romantic action comedy that has made its way to streaming. Photo: Netflix.
2024 has not been a good year for Netflix’s original movies.
Every few weeks there’s a new promise of fun IP that Netflix has spent millions of dollars on only for it to be an absolute dud on release.
There have been a few exceptions: Hitman, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F and Society of Snow have all been fantastic but the rest of Netflix’s catalogue has left a lot to be desired including its new action comedy The Union.
The Union adds to the list of action comedy stinkers that streaming has tried to push for the past two years. Movies like Argyle, Ghosted, The Instigators, The Family Plan, Lift, The Nice Girls, Freelance and Jackpot, just to name a few, are all medium to high-budget action flicks that have been released on streaming since the beginning of 2023 and are so bland that I ask you, the reader, to try and distinguish the difference between any of them.
The Union has Mark Wahlberg’s Mike, a down-to-earth construction worker trying to rekindle a high school romance with Halle Berry’s Roxanne. Mike is thrown into the world of spies and espionage upon learning that Roxanne is a CIA operative.
Yes, you’ve seen this movie 100 times before and no, The Union does nothing to reinvent the wheel or even make the genre interesting.
Action comedies, especially ones with romantically entwined main characters, really need charismatic and chemistry-fueled duos. That’s why Hitman, starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, was so well received. The Union really, really struggles in this department and it leaves its product feeling uninspired and boring.
Wahlberg and Berry look bored in their roles and it carries over into the narrative. If the characters we’re watching don’t look interested in what they’re doing, why should we?
The action is also very bare-bones. I know I’m asking a lot for a romantic action comedy to deliver some exciting scenes, but The Union is the definition of basic. If you were to look up generic fight sequences, I would not be shocked if scenes from this film were the top search results.
It’s disappointing too, because Netflix has proven with so many of its TV shows that it can make fantastic original content. Even its licenced content has a certain charm to it, yet for some reason or another it just hasn’t had the creative runaway success in the movie space.
The Union has shot to number one on Netflix’s trending page so it must be doing something to draw in viewers but, outside of a couple of attractive leads, there’s nothing here for me.
I’d be interested to see how long the watch time is compared to the number of people who chose to watch it because as of writing, The Union sits on a 25 per cent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which clearly shows not a lot of people love it.
If I were a producer at Netflix, I’d seriously consider scrapping any more pitches for this type of movie because dishing out $80+ million on these awful-looking, terribly acted, uninspired snooze fests can’t be drawing the subscribers that they’re hoping for.
The Union just wasn’t for me. There’s a lot of great stuff at the cinema at the moment, instead of staying inside and watching crap like this, go out and treat yourself to a trip to the movies instead.
The Union is currently streaming on Netflix.
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