Step aside Cuaron. Sit down, Scorsese. Go home, Baumbach. Netflix has a new director in town and he needs room to blow shit up. That man is Michael Bay.
Photo by: Christian Black/Courtesy of Netflix
Netflix has done incredibly well in the last year with their original film content, becoming a major player in the awards season with The Irishman and Marriage Story primed to sweep across numerous awarding bodies. So, in order to balance out those more prestigious projects, the powers that be at Netflix have also thrown $150 million at the pyrotechnic auteur Michael Bay and have seemingly let him off the leash to do whatever he may please with it. The results are just as barmy and as incoherent as you’d expect.
Ryan Reynolds stars as ‘One’, a billionaire who has faked his own death in order to put together an elite squad of other supposedly dead and highly skilled individuals all code-named by numbers and fighting to make the world a better place. Working together, they work as ‘ghosts’ taking down the worst of the worst, with no government body telling them what to do or where they should go. Their latest mission is their most dangerous yet, as they set out to launch a coup to take down a violent and callous dictator responsible for the deaths of many of his people.
There is something resembling a plot within the chaos of 6 Underground but you’d be forgiven if you thought there wasn’t. This doesn’t really follow the flow of a ‘mercenaries on a mission’ narrative. Instead, this is a whacked-out, over-edited scrapbook of action sequences, juvenile jokes, and quirks masquerading as character ‘development’. It is a film hyped up on its own concept without ever really explaining it properly, choosing to focus on a loosely linear narrative that cuts back and forth from different character’s origins into the group (although some get more served than others), before a final act that focuses more on the vaguely detailed mission at hand.
But, this is a Michael Bay film. You haven’t come to appreciate the level of storytelling craft or nuanced characters. Everyone is an inconsistent, 2D, cheesy cut-out of well-worn stereotypes. The guys are macho, the women are sexy, the guns are big and the explosions are loud. The film is absolutely relentless from the off with a good 20-minute car chase throughout Florence that pretty much lays down the vibe of the film from the very get-go; that being a thin script being pushed through the Michael Bay meat grinder to create something that feels running on adrenaline and has little care for whether or not you understand anything that is happening.
Bay, love him or hate him, clearly has a flair for distinctive action that has a personality entirely his own, and his skills are on show here in certain moments. That opening chase is breathlessly edited, and I will forever be in awe of just how much coverage Bay gets for his sequences. It feels like he has a camera quite literally everywhere, which helps create a sense of scale particularly as the film trots across the globe to various beautiful locales. A sequence atop a luxury penthouse in Hong Kong is also well-executed and on the right side of silly, but he drops the ball somewhat in the loony final third which loses a sense of space and environment that Bay is usually pretty good at articulating once it becomes focused aboard a luxury yacht.
While there is always something to be said for Bay’s mad scientist approach to action sequences, you kinda have to wonder what the point is when you’re sat there watching something that has absolutely no sense of momentum and little narrative cohesion to it. The performances range from one note to grating, with the cast largely feeling wasted. The violence itself can also be a little hard to swallow. At one moment the violence has an entertainingly cartoonish element to it, but then the next we’re witnessing townspeople and young children being attacked by their own government. These two things sit weirdly next to each other and leave more of a bad taste in the mouth than you feel there needs to be.
6 Underground is Bay off the leash, and it will do absolutely nothing to convert anyone to Bay’s gospel. For this reviewer, who has often been able to appreciate the skill and imagination behind some of Bay’s efforts, 6 Underground still doesn’t really work. Bar a couple of ridiculous sequences that stand out for their colourful design and audaciousness, the film is simply too aimless to find much of a reason to care beyond the over-stylised film-making, largely down to a weird approach to tone and characters who irritate more than they charm. But hey, if you’ve come to see things go boom, then you’ll get more than enough bang for your buck.
6 Underground is now on Netflix.
