Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry in the Netflix film

Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry) is a globetrotting super spy who carries out complicated missions with ease. Need to kidnap a billionaire crime boss from a heavily guarded hotel room without disturbing the other guests? She's the one for you. Is the world order as we know it about to collapse due to an unprecedented intelligence leak? She's the one for you. So when Roxanne is faced with the most important mission of her career, it's quite surprising that she decides to enlist some extra help. Even more surprising is that her preferred phone buddy is her old friend who has never left his hometown, nor shown the slightest interest (or talent) in fighting crime.

When we first meet Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg, who, you might imagine, is the first to get any script about a construction worker sent to save the world), he's waking up after a one-night stand with his 7th-grade English teacher. For anyone who's interested, it's revealed that they had sex “once and a half.” When she kicks him out of bed, he goes about his day the same way he has for the past 30 years. He heads to the construction site, laughs with his worker buddies while donning his hardhat and neon vest, lifts heavy metal beams, eats lunch atop a skyscraper under construction, then lets off steam by playing pool at a local dive bar.

The montage is confusingly set to Bruce Springsteen's “The Promised Land” – a real banger, but whose lyrics, about cutting the pain out of your heart with a knife, don't quite fit with the light-hearted male friendship that's on screen. But he's a working man, and working men like Springsteen, so we shouldn't question that.

Mike gets an unexpected change when Roxanne comes into the bar looking for him. His high school sweetheart initially seems interested in playing a few rounds of pool and reminiscing about their glory days when they made out to The Boss' cover of “Jersey Girl,” but it's not long before she drugs him and flies him to London in his sleep. When Mike wakes up across the pond, he learns he's been recruited to join the U.S. government's most elite and secret intelligence agency: The Union.

As it turns out, the U.S. government has officially recognized that all of the FBI and CIA's elite academies were too soft and incompetent to solve the world's problems, so they've decided to put the Workers' Union in charge of the real work of fighting international terrorism. The union is made up entirely of average guys who have worked in factories, loading docks, construction sites, and other places that keep the world running with good, old-fashioned hard work. These tough men and women have all been handpicked for being smarter than their big-money corporate bosses, and have been recruited to use their street smarts and work ethic on the world's most sensitive counterintelligence missions.

Even by the standards of a direct-to-Netflix film released in 2024 and starring Mark Wahlberg, The Union is completely moronic. Despite never being shown to be particularly good at his construction job, Mike is pressed into a six-week training program before teaming up with Roxanne to track down a briefcase containing endless amounts of stolen global intelligence secrets. And this may be shocking, but Mike's stodgy American ways make him a fish out of water in London — though Roxanne is eventually charmed by his earnestness and remembers why she loved him in the first place.

But while the film's ridiculous premise is at least chuckle-worthy – and delivered quite convincingly by a cast that all seems to agree on how stupid the movie is – its convoluted MacGuffin and predictable twists mean that neither director Julian Farino's most elaborate action sequences nor the genuine chemistry between Wahlberg and Berry can make The Union something worth watching.

It's easy to imagine a world where this nonsense dominates Netflix's streaming charts for months at a time, but its success will have less to do with narrative achievement than with the dislike millions of people feel toward their own bosses.

Grade: C

“The Union” will be available on Netflix starting Friday, August 16.

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