6 Underground, 2019.
Directed by Michael Bay.
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Corey Hawkins, Ben Hardy, and Dave Franco.
SYNOPSIS:
Meet a new kind of action hero. Six untraceable agents, totally off the grid. They’ve buried their pasts so they can change the future.
The on-paper appeal of 6 Underground speaks for itself; a Michael Bay film starring Ryan Reynolds, written by Deadpool screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, and dropping day-and-date on Netflix. No matter your own possible (probable?) vitriol for Bay, it’s in the very least a morbidly curious proposition, to see how well Bay’s havoc-wreaking sensibilities mesh with the streaming platform’s ambitious desire to deliver multiplex-caliber tentpole films to their streaming platter.
And though the constituent elements certainly intrigue, this is a flatly generic action movie melange. It’s effectively Bay’s Suicide Squad, as a billionaire magnet magnate (important later) simply named “One” (Ryan Reynolds) puts together a team of specialists – as played by Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Corey Hawkins, Ben Hardy, and Dave Franco – to topple corrupt governments and kill Real Bad Guys.
Not a bad hook by any means, but one hobbled almost immediately by its achingly simplistic, video game-aping globe-trotting set-pieces – which perfectly match its video game-indebted plot – where visual coherence is only a secondary or perhaps even a tertiary concern.
Take the opening chase sequence in Florence, the narrative particulars of which don’t matter at all. This frantic 20-minute vehicular and on-foot chase seems entirely within Bay’s wheelhouse given his history, and yet, shots are bafflingly hacked up into mere fractions of a second, to the extent viewers are liable to be at least irritated if not fighting off a debilitating migraine.
Things thankfully calm down a bit later on – a Hong Kong skyscraper showdown half-way through is the dubious highlight. And yet, the whole still feels oddly undercooked for Bay who, a master of cinematic bombast, clearly misses the steady pull of an IMAX camera system (quite literally, given the amount of infuriating shaky cam on offer here). One benefit of the slightly reduced scale compared to the Transformers movies, however, is that 6 Underground runs barely two hours in length, an incredible rarity for a filmmaker who has basically built his brand on over-egging the pudding.
The cinematography, especially when viewed in 4K HDR, is undeniably appealing whenever Bay slows things down enough for the audience to focus on anything – usually one of the seemingly hundreds of paid product placements noticeable throughout – but if audiences expect Bay to take things to their technical zenith as recompense for the idiocy of the storytelling, the trade doesn’t feel quite so worth it this time.
This is compounded by the disappointingly lacklustre script; character backstories are ladled out with just slightly less perfunctoriness than in Suicide Squad, in that characters here get entire scenes devoted to their origins rather than mere portions of a montage. But it’s mostly in one ear and out the other; they’ve all got a tortured past and aren’t that terrible really. The gist is the dull same across the lot, and so stock you’ll likely lose track of it all long before the movie ends.
The moment-to-moment writing meanwhile lacks the peppy Deadpool flair; juvenile quips are fielded out as well as can be expected by the cast, though rarely raise much of a chuckle. It’s all too reliant on vomiting pop-culture references at the audience while lacking the charming playfulness of Ryan Reynolds’ R-rated superhero – no matter how much a quip-happy Reynolds tries here. He’s very nearly Wade Wilson sans-superpowers, by the way.
Typically for Bay though not-so-typically for Wernick and Reese, tonal issues abound throughout. If the Deadpool movies walk on a delicate razor’s edge of dishing up brutal violence amid thigh-slapping one-liners, there’s a genuine mean-spiritedness to much of the carnage on offer here. Characters are offed in a number of gory ways, pedestrians are violently wiped out like they’re nothing, and then we’re asked to laugh at an “hilarious” joke. For those who found Bay’s Pain & Gain too tonally unwieldy, 6 Underground will be an absolute nightmare.
This all adds up to a malnourished effort that takes talented actors like Reynolds, Laurent, Franco, Hawkins, and Hardy, and does little memorable with them. Reynolds is desperately trying to keep the whole thing aloft with his comedic rat-a-tat charm offensive, and Hardy gets a few surprisingly effective dramatic scenes, but for the most part the characters (and therefore the actors) feel more like props than people.
It’ll be interesting to see how general audiences respond to the film; it’s a big screen entertainment made for the small screen with a bevy of talented actors and clear franchise potential.
There’s an obvious allure to watching a movie like this day-and-date at home, and with the feeling that viewers are getting a new $150 million Michael Bay movie for “free” as part of their Netflix dues, it’s quite probable many will deem it “good enough” – that is, passable cinematic white noise after a hard day’s work. It’s certainly more ripe for the sequel treatment than the streamer’s 2017 Will Smith-starring fantasy slop-fest Bright, that’s for sure.
Though not without its amusing moments, Michael Bay’s latest is too chaotically edited and scattershot to realise its grandiose potential.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
