Why You Didn’t Like … The Union

Maybe you’ve wondered what a good movie with Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg would be like.  

You’re going to have to keep wondering.

There’s a style of kung fu called Zui Quan (pronounced: ZWAY CHWAHN), also known as Drunken Boxing or Drunken Fist. The art and artistry of this style of combat involve defying grace with gracelessness, ultimately returning full circle to grace. Drunken Fist allows the practitioner a level of freedom that stricter forms of Shaolin Temple Boxing or Wing Chun might not permit. It famously featured in Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master.

It would be a mistake to assume Drunken Fist’s practitioners were merely flailing around on the floor in some kind of seizure. They didn’t give up their training after the first week and head to the nearest bar, hoping it would all work out. They trained for years so that their resulting mastery looked like ineptitude.

With The Union, I feel we have plain old-fashioned ineptitude.

We checked out the latest divisive Netflix movie, The Union. It features Marky Mark, without the Funky Bunch, and Halle Berry, without the X-Men. It’s a movie designed for entertainment, but the narrative missteps result in cognitive dissonance so high you might feel like you’re having a dissociative episode by Act 3.

The structure is built on good foundations. Mark Wahlberg plays everyman Mike McKenna, a name so close to his own that I have to wonder if it was chosen so no one would forget it. Halle Berry plays Roxanne Hall, which feels like a name chosen by a focus group tasked with finding the fine line between “sexy super agent handle” and “stripper.” Mike and Rox used to be a thing, and then one day Rox blew out of town, leaving Mike to his blue-collar existence.

There’s nothing wrong with this setup, and when Rox comes back to recruit Mike for the chance of a lifetime, there’s a real chemistry between Berry and Wahlberg that made me understand why they were an item. Hijinks ensue, where Mark is kidnapped, trained to be a secret agent, and undergoes a rapid tune-up to Jack Reacher levels in the space of a couple of weeks. It made me wonder if there was a radioactive spider scene left on the cutting room floor.

The secret agent stuff is fun. The car chases are decent, and while Berry’s kung fu physicality is unconvincing, the choreography is solid. There’s a good cast of supporting characters, including Mike Colter. These supporting characters are well chosen; the casting is on point.

So, why the salt?

Life Choices

I had a lot of questions while watching, and these weren’t the deep, thought-provoking kind. These were the, “Did I just waste two hours of my life on this?” kind.

Some movies want to leave your brain in a blender. Remember Drunken Fist?

• In Nolan’s 2006 The Prestige, the film’s narrative twists around two rival magicians. For some viewers, the ending broke the suspension of disbelief. For others, it was a masterstroke in shifted perspective storytelling, mirroring the tricks the magicians themselves used. You might not be a fan, but you can see what Nolan was going for.
• Scorsese dropped Shutter Island in 2010. It sets up a mystery thriller, but DiCaprio’s character’s unreliable nature and the twist that much of what we saw wasn’t “real” left some viewers feeling manipulated or cheated. But you could also see how the manipulation was planned. It might have sucked, but it was wilful sucking.
• Not to be outdone, 2014’s Predestination by the Spierigs was brilliant and maddening. The paradox-heavy time-looping narrative lacked Looper’s pure and fun elegance, leaving viewers reeling from the mental gymnastics. Others were left intrigued by its complexity. It was a sort of funhouse mirror for your mind.

Before we go further: be warned, there are spoilers.

SPOILERS WARNING

What The Union does isn’t a Jedi mind trick. It’s not even really a trick. The real villain turns out to be, surprise of surprises, Rox’s ex-husband, a move engineered in a lab to drive tension between Mike and Rox. However, Colter’s Nick Faraday somehow managed to:

1. Blow up a van while being in a different location.
2. Get someone to shoot his squad without any of these highly trained operatives knowing where the shots were coming from.
3. Once he fakes his own death, he is still privy to the Union’s secrets, even those that occur in conversation without any systems-level mission hacking.

Essentially, he manages to do things that are impossible, or at least exceptionally improbable, and we’re all supposed to believe it was part of the plan. This is no drunken master. This one is just drunk.

It’s possible we’re supposed to believe Jessica De Gouw’s Juliet Quinn has the kind of hustle to pull in the muscle to do this, but this doesn’t hold water. At the end of the movie, Juliet walks out on Nick because the stakes are too high. She has some muscle, but not the kind to face down the buyer of their stolen secrets in an open plaza with clear sight lines. She blows up no cars, nor does she have highly trained snipers in place as would have been required in Rox’s betrayal.

Then, there’s the blue-collar angle. The film is designed to showcase that blue-collar workers are good and decent people. I think we can get behind this message without needing a movie to tell us. But where things become really unhooked is how one of these people manages to smuggle two on-the-run agents, whose faces are plastered across everyone’s wanted list, aboard a plane. If it was that easy to smuggle humans onto planes, Al-Qaeda would be having a field day.

It’s this kind of clumsy storytelling that beleaguers the back half of the movie, culminating in a scene where apparently a BMW from 1836 is somehow as fast as a modern sports car.

The issues with the film are that it provides unintentional confusion instead of controlled chaos. There should always be an answer, and it should be satisfying. The Union just leaves you plain old confused. It doesn’t respect its audience like Nolan or Scorsese, falling back on lazy writing. It has no clever line between plot twist and hole like Predestination, which follows its own internal logic, even when complex or paradoxical. It is just plain old plot holes.

You didn’t miss something important. The movie missed it.

Respecting Your Audience

This might be my own personal hill to die on, but I feel like society has moved on from gags about race, size, and age.

There is a confusing moment where Rox and Mike are in a car, and suddenly she accuses his father of being racist, and he accuses her father of hating blue-collar workers. This scene felt a little like a reshoot; that audiences might not have understood why they broke up in the first place (and honestly, I’m still wondering). The issue is that there was no prior indication of racism or classism. It just doesn’t fit. Any message the movie tried to convey about class or human nature falters at this moment, leaving us wondering if Rox understood the organisation she worked for, or if Mike didn’t realise his girlfriend was Black and what that meant.

Then there’s an attempt at reusing a gag where Mark, or Mike, or whatever his name is, has a fling with an older woman. The way this is portrayed is that he is down on his luck, unable to reach the heady heights of his ex-girlfriend Rox, or anyone at all, really. This relies on replacing an age and weight attribute with a worth index; the “gag” only works because Mike should be able to “do better.” It places a value judgment on women, and men, based on their superficial attributes, and makes a poor attempt to explain why Mike might be interested in an older teacher now that he’s all grown up. The gag is used to describe a part of his rock-bottom nature—sleeping with older, heavier people while driving around in a stolen car and struggling to buy beers at the pub.

So, What?

The line between a drunken master and just plain drunk is crystal clear, and in The Union, we’re definitely dealing with the latter. The intent vs. clumsiness debate is key here. While some films aim to leave you questioning and reeling on purpose, The Union makes you feel like you’ve stumbled into a movie that’s not quite finished—like they handed the script to interns and said, “Just wing it.”

The spectacle might have had its moments of fun, but it’s marred by clichés, plot holes, and a lack of coherent storytelling. It feels like a movie that tried to serve up a high-octane thrill ride but ended up delivering a half-baked, confused mess.

If you’re hunting for a film that respects its audience and delivers a satisfying, coherent experience, keep looking. The Union is a bit like Mike’s early movie romance—ultimately leaving you wondering if you could’ve done better. It’s a spectacle wrapped in confusion, perfectly suited for a Netflix binge where expectations are as low as Mike’s romantic prospects at the start.

And if you do watch it, and it leaves you scratching your head, remember: sometimes it’s not about you missing something. It’s about the movie missing the point.

Let me know in the comments below how you found The Union. You’ll find them right below the Like button. Thanks for watching!