Lightning-fast edits. Sudden slow-motion. An overheated color palette. Whip-speed fragmented dialogue. Crashing metal – though, thankfully, none of it robotic this time. An immature remark made by a male character drooling over an objectified bombshell. A well-coordinated blast of sonic and visual overload. It’s all classic Michael Bay, and this is just the opening action set piece of his latest action extravaganza, “6 Underground.” All that’s missing is a woman introduced by her legs! (Bay can’t help himself, though, because a few sleek tilts up from the feet arrive around the 45-minute mark.) The film is a pure expression of the id for a filmmaker who thrives on moving at 100 cuts per second; for everyone else, as the expression goes, your mileage may vary.
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“6 Underground” marks Bay’s first outing for a streaming service, an economic reality that shows in the fiber of the film. This is art emblematic of Netflix that bears the stamp of being produced by an entertainment behemoth at (or nearing) its zenith. Virtually every minute of the movie speaks to a product made with a virtually unlimited budget and practically non-existent corporate interference in the creative product. There’s already a chasm opening up in straight-to-streaming work between directors able to discipline themselves as they did for a theatrical release and those who permit self-indulgence to bloat their output. Bay falls towards the latter end of the spectrum here, though the polish of a director who knows which levers to pull for unabashed cinematic spectacle does prevent the film from a descent into incoherency.
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Bay gets a big assist for most of the film from star Ryan Reynolds, the billionaire frontman of the titular paramilitary force. It’s hardly a stretch for the actor to turn on his smarm-and-charm routine that works so well in “Deadpool,” but the film does not require a commanding lead performance so much as it needs an appealing center of gravity to anchor the global ensemble. It also doesn’t hurt that Bay retained the services of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, frequent scribes for Reynolds’ projects, to help provide a steady stream of snarky wisecracks to grease the wheels between action scenes.
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Reynolds’ 1 leads his international team of mercenaries known only by their assigned numeral, each assumed dead by those in their previous life, with a dispassionate regimentation. Everyone performs the function that corresponds to the skillset they bring to the 6 Underground team and works towards their ultimate goal of taking down enemies deemed too dangerous to counter with government forces. These are evil people, 1 emphatically stresses. What, exactly, is the nature of this evil that inspires these non-state actor vigilantes and unites them in common cause? Well… don’t ask questions the movie isn’t prepared to answer (nor has any interest in answering).
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The globe-trotting adventures zeroes in on a single target: the fictional dictator of Turgistan, whom the 6 Underground team intends to depose by inspiring a coup and installing his brother. “6 Underground” presents as apolitical, of course, but just like Bay’s Benghazi epic “13 Hours,” the film’s politics reside less in what it actually says and primarily in what it asks you to ignore. Here, that’s regime change, which the film brushes off as completely benign and not any kind of incursion by Westerners.
On the flip side, this tunnel vision allows the film to organize and coalesce around an uncomplicated and digestible narrative journey. It would be easy to miss a page of the action as the worldwide adventures of the team go from Florence to Abu Dhabi (standing in for Hong Kong) and more, lending the film an additional function as a glossy ad for high-end travel as well as the luxury brands one might associate with such exotic destinations. But simplicity is the name of the game here. It’s present in the thematics with the group’s new member 7 (Corey Hawkins), an ex-U.S. military member, challenging 1’s aversion to any family-like dynamic amidst the team, and it extends all the way to the relentless forward motion of the plot.
While the setup of “6 Underground” might sound a bit like the “Mission: Impossible” series – the two even share a producer in Skydance’s David Ellison – the similarities end at the structural level. Whereas the long-running film series builds momentum through carefully calibrated sequences driven by suspense, Bay just opts for overwhelming the senses. The evil in “6 Underground,” beyond its murky colonialist undertones, is so nebulously defined that it fails to terrify any more than a typical bulky gun-wielding man would.
And when it comes to having an emotional core as Tom Cruise has provided with Ethan Hunt, Reynolds is just not up to the task. While he’s perfected the mischievous misanthrope part of the action hero, any attempts at seriousness feel insincere. His register for earnestness appears to stop when the end of a 30-second ad hits, and he encourages the purchase of his personally branded Aviation Gin. The script does Reynolds no favors, either, by insisting he arrives at a point of emotional clarity by the end of “6 Underground” while also providing him no scenes that might prove he actually underwent any kind of journey to get there. At least the rest of “6 Underground” has the decency to provide some semblance of an engaging thrill ride when moving a viewer quickly from point A to point B. [C]
