6 Underground
- A mindless action flick that’s sometimes more frustrating than entertaining.
Full Disclosure: Michael Bay. Ryan Reynolds. It could be horrible, it could be fun. But it’s on Netflix, and seemed like an easy thing to click on at the end of a long day when I wasn’t in the mood for a movie that I would actually need to think about. Let’s just say my expectations were muted for this one
Review
Michael Bay definitely has his place in cinematic history, as perhaps the most over-the-top action movie director of all time. Sometimes he’s awful (the Transformers movies), but he’s also responsible for a few ridiculous guilty pleasures (The Rock, Armageddon). Either way, his movies are made for the big screen, so it was a little strange to hear that he made a movie for Netflix. I guess it’s hard to walk away from $150 million, the reported budget that he was given for this flick. Did it mean that he would try to tailor the movie-making for the small screen? Um, no. No he did not.
After a meaningless voiceover montage sequence, 6 Underground begins with a car chase through Florence, Italy. Why is this group of people being chased through Florence? It doesn’t really matter. Fast Cars! Crashes! Explosions! Gunfire! That’s basically all we’re supposed to care about. And Michael Bay decided to go full Michael Bay for this sequence. It’s like he said, “Hey, you know all the close-up action stuff in Transformers that you hated because it was impossible to see what the hell was going on? Well, I’m going to start this movie with that, but I’m going to add a random strobe light effect too!” Viewers prone to photosensitive epilepsy beware!
Luckily, that effect only lasted a little while before we were deep into the action on the furious car chase. To be fair, some of the action shots here were pretty cool. The main problem is that we weren’t told much about who the team are (Ryan Reynolds and crew, the action interspersed with a few quick introductions with graphics giving numbers and titles like “The Doctor”, “The Spook”, and “The Hitman”), who is chasing them, or where they’re supposed to be trying to go.
If this is meant to be the introduction of this team as some sort of elite secret force, it failed. After seemingly driving around Florence aimlessly for many, many minutes, it just made them seem like a bunch of idiots without a plan. Also, while there were legitimately a few great Baby Driver-esque driving manoeuvres, it never seemed to make a difference. A couple of cars would crash behind them, only to be replacing by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of additional bad guys, and even with all of the fancy driving, they never seemed to gain ground on any of them.
Just in case anyone is confused - yes, this is a Michael Bay movie.
The movie gets slightly better from there, in that there is an attempt at giving us some semblance of a plot. Basically, the idea is this: Ryan Reynolds’ character is some rich dude who decided to fake his death and go off the grid in order to recruit a team of people to take out really, really bad guys in order to see some positive change in the world that he otherwise didn’t think he could affect with his billions of dollars in the real world. Got it? Let’s move on.
It’s hard to believe that this movie was written by the same writing team behind the Deadpool and Zombieland movies (Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese). Those movies all have great moments of comedy and levity, and are filled with clever lines and funny banter between their characters. This movie seemed to be trying to include some of that, but it mostly fell flat. The impression that I’m left with is that it must be the fault of the director.
Earlier in his career, Bay seemed to be in on the joke. With movies like Bad Boys and The Rock, there always seemed to be an unspoken acknowledgement that we weren’t to be taking any of this too seriously. Somewhere along the way things changed. This is incredibly subjective, of course, because we’re talking about nuances of tone, but I think that starting with Pearl Harbour, Bay started to direct everything as if he’s taking it seriously. This directorial tone just doesn’t work with the kind of script that Wernick and Reese write.
Spoilers Ahead
Ryan Reynolds, seen here sticking his head out of the passenger-side window during a car chase for some reason, really phoned in his performance in this movie.
The bulk of the movie involves a plan to kill a bunch of generals who work for a brutal dictator (of a fictional movie “-istan” country), first prying from them the knowledge of the whereabouts of the dictator’s democracy-loving brother, then rescue/kidnap the brother, and finally launch a coup against the dictator before killing him and installing the brother in his place.
The team succeeds of course, and the lesson was the friendships they made along the way. I guess. There is some effort to make Reynolds’ character strictly business in the beginning - everyone is referred to by number, there is very little thought given to a member who dies in the opening car chase and is promptly replaced, there is to be no personal attachment, etc. - but eventually the team begins to trust one another and form friendships.
That’s what we’re supposed to believe, but, in part due to the supposedly-witty banter falling flat, there is very little chemistry between the characters. Ditto a haphazard love story angle – or maybe it’s just a random meaningless sex angle – either way, there’s no chemistry at all between the two characters, and so it’s very hard to believe when Melanie Laurent’s character tells Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s character at the end that she’d love to meet his mother.
Look, the movie isn’t all bad. As with many Michael Bay movies, there are some fantastic action shots, and beautiful locations shown in brilliantly-lit splendour. There’s also a fairly cool bit in the final showdown where Reynolds’ techno genius character rigs the dictator’s yacht to become a giant magnet, tossing the evil henchmen and their weapons about the ship whenever he activates it using his cell phone. Ridiculous? Sure, but also kind of fun. The kind of fun that I was hoping for going into the movie but of which we just don’t get enough.
The 6 Underground team. There are 6 members of the team, and we don’t really care about any of them.
5 Quick Hits
Reynolds, who is usually charming and watchable, even if he basically does the same schtick in every movie, really phones in this performance. It’s like he realized that the material didn’t warrant anything more than a half-assed effort. His talents using his whole ass might have made this movie a little better.
Speaking of Reynolds, there is an obligatory (seriously, I assume it’s going to be a standard feature in his contract from now on) Aviation Gin product placement in a random bar scene. Has anyone tried this stuff? The ads are great, but I don’t know if it’s any good. You have to hand it to him, though, he’s really pouring his heart and soul into trying to make sure that people are pouring glasses of his booze. He definitely is putting more effort into that than he did into his performance here.
I’ve heard that Netflix was hoping that this could become a franchise, something they’re desperately in search of. They effectively have no movie franchise IP of their own, unless you count The Christmas Prince, which I certainly do not. Well, this is unlikely to spark a Fast and Furious-type of action movie franchise for them. I just can’t imagine people will care enough to see these particularly characters get back together again.
I have no idea what Melanie Laurent was doing in this movie. Most of her roles in English-language movies have been interesting, and she’s worked with directors like Denis Villeneuve and Quentin Tarantino. I really hope she was paid well for this.
This was a strange time of year for Netflix to release this movie. It’s obviously not Oscar-bait, and as far as I can tell, every other movie they’ve released over the past month has been a Christmas movie starring Vanessa Hudgens. Maybe this is their idea of counter-programming?
