REVIEW: ‘The Union’ Is Peak Dad-Core

With a familiar cast and equally familiar plot, the Netflix Original spy movie The Union (2024), directed by Julian Farino and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, is about as just fine as it gets. Mark Wahlberg plays a regular guy, Mike, in a union job, living in the same New Jersey town and hanging out with the same friends he has his whole life. But when his old high school flame R0xanne (Halle Berry) shows up out of nowhere, he’s dragged into an international espionage situation with an ultra-covert outfit, The Union.

The movie is so fine. Most impressive is that it isn’t outright bad, given Netflix’s recent track record. There’s nothing offensive about it. The characters don’t have chemistry necessarily, but they at least seem somewhat interested in being there. Wahlberg and Berry do anyway. J.K. Simmons and Mike Colter: Maybe a bit less so. The Union has a very clear target audience: middle-aged men who like action movies and think with a few weeks of training, they could probably be in one, too.

And that’s certainly what The Union delivers. The action is mild, the dialogue is poor but filled with countless dad jokes per mile, and the male characters themselves are as disheveled and “regular” as possible. Meanwhile, all the women are bombshells with all of the tact and guile in the world. What middle-aged man wouldn’t be glad to see Halle Berry back on the screen as a no-nonsense love interest for the first time in a while? And again, fortunately, The Union doesn’t play any of these cards offensively. Its tropes are all matter-of-fact, not exploitative. While the movie is far from interesting or exciting, it’s neither dull nor appalling, either.

The one thing that The Union offends me with personally is its wretched attempt at New Jersey accents. Neither of its stars are from the Garden State. They both have perfectly neutral-sounding accents in the first place. Why force them to sound like a stereotypically New Jersey ruffian when they clearly can’t pull it off? Especially Berry. It’s too much. It almost feels like the accents are there solely to support one joke about Wahlberg being from Boston. But, to the movie’s credit, the setting and maybe even the accents do ground the very successful average-sploitation it’s going for. Ordinary guys doing extraordinary things isn’t easy to pull off and The Union does more or less master it. Having a couple of true blue union members help save the day certainly helps.

It’s also helped by a shockingly sincere later scene where Mike is sitting in a bar alone, and he gets a call from one of his best friends. Mike’s missing out on their friend’s bachelor party, and at first, the bros are ragging on him for it, but by the end of the call, they’re expressing how they miss him but, of course, know that if he’s not there it’s for a good reason and that they trust him and can’t wait to see him soon. It’s a small but, frankly, touching little moment that feels deeply important to constructing this dad-core movie. It reminds middle-aged men that it’s okay to love your bros. It’s not a common theme in movies like these.

What is overly common and less impressive are the needle drops. The movie is meant to have a light-hearted tone, sure. It starts with Mike waking up in his former middle school teacher’s bed and making small talk with her son, who is maybe a little younger than him, at the breakfast table. But some of the needle drops are just there to create outrageously bad tone shifts. Tense action sequences will suddenly cut to fluffy, poppy music. None of the songs are memorable. They’re just there to evoke a certain sensibility. But several times, that shift is very jarring.

The Union is fine. It’s a movie about how any average, middle-aged man could suddenly become an action hero without ever having to give up the life that makes them so average in the first place. It’s not deriding anybody or exploiting its characters. It’s not good, but impressively, it isn’t bad either. It’ll entertain your dad for sure. And maybe it’ll entertain you too.

The Union is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.