No!!! This movie promises to be a no-thoughts-just-vibes action movie that my boyfriend (Boston native) and I (New Jersey native) could mindlessly enjoy for an evening. That’s what it says on the box! That’s why we watched it!

But ho! This is just a mirage! This movie did something you wouldn’t think a machine-generated, hopelessly be-trope’d Netflix flick would be capable of – made me think! And tell multiple people to watch it! And use a lot of exclamation points in a review! Because – I just have to know – if anyone else is seeing what I’m seeing??

This movie has an innumerable list of petty flaws. For fun I’ll enumerate them. 

(1) The all-western-allies’-secret-identities-in-a-briefcase McGuffin. Ok, totally insane, but let’s just say that’s what happened (impossible, might I add). You’re Halle Berry’s character, and you go find your old high school flame, who’s some blue collar guy with no spy training (that’s the whole point), and you give him spy training. Now he’s a spy who’s not in the database. Then you give him a NEW SECRET IDENTITY, because??? You want Mark Wahlberg to do one line in a Boston accent??? Could you have perhaps given this secret identity to a TRAINED SPY and been in the same situation? 

(1a) While I’m on the all-western-allies’-secret-identities-in-a-briefcase subject – who do these guys think they’re fooling? This is not some single physical handoff object just because you put it in a shiny briefcase for posterity’s sake. This is digital information. It can be copied. That shit is gone. It’s out there, probably in a less conspicuously villainous form factor, like oh, I don’t know, any laptop, a SanDisk, who cares.  

(1b) And then when Halle Berry checks the briefcase with what can only amount to a stud finder and says “yeah that’s it” how does she KNOW? Hash code for this exact formatting of that information? She checked it against her other all-western-allies’-secret-identities-in-a-briefcase reference table? I know this is petty even on the petty issues list but the implications haunt me.

(2) Halle Berry’s character’s hair

(3) So they have the big CIA brass come in, and they’re all impatient and demanding, and the union guys are like “ugh, these guys don’t get it, they’re so impatient and demanding, they don’t know diddly squat about a hard day’s work” and it’s like no actually I think they DO get it, they’re concerned about *checks notes* all-western-allies’-secret-identities-in-a-briefcase being sold to IRAN!! (Sorry to any Iranians in the audience – this is Spy Movie Hollywood Iran which is Bad in a simple, un-nuanced way). And Mr. Amazon’s code is resolving the IP location of the secret auction piece by piece like a game of Risk, why did this even WORK, like the lone fancy British Spy Lady (this whole thing is happening in London FYI) isn’t going to use a VPN???? While running a criminal auction out of a bar??? None of you IDIOTS have seen a Surfshark ad? 

(4) OMG is this working-class advanced spy agency incapable! Thank God they scraped Mark Wahlberg up off the streets of New Jersey or – or – wait… what are the stakes here again? J. K. Simmons’ friend gets shot? Global Caliphate? Well, phew, at least we never had to actually think about it. 

But alas, this list is not what makes this movie so special. (In fact quite the opposite; it – painfully – makes it nought but commonplace). This movie’s spectacular and rant-worthy structural flaw is titular. BEG I ASK: Did anyone on this whole fucking set know what a union does? (Perhaps a nearby writer? Were any of those around?) Halle Berry’s character, proudly, says she does her time-consuming and dangerous job for $10/hr and dental. I worked for an auto company as an engineer. Let me tell you something: union workers are not just there, proud to do the tough job for $10/hr, no problems boss! They’re not just a rough-around-the-edges, work-hard-get-it-done, blue collar everyman AESTHETIC. These people organize! They make rules! They want to get paid! That’s the motto. That’s what The Union is for. 

SO WHAT is our OTC villain’s cookie-cutter motivation? The highly capable, skilled laborer, ex-Union traitor? Oh, MONEY??? Is that what he said? Gee, I wonder what would’ve happened if THE UNION paid him enough???? (!!!!) (???) (!) 

The great, stumblingly profound offense that this movie offers, which inspires such emotion as you have seen before you today, is that it dresses itself up in a blue collar visage, and then is COMPLETELY cosmopolitan, in the substance of this issues it deals with, the posh English veneer it dips itself in for no reason, and the utter disregard it shows for what people in a union actually value for their time on the clock. In this, it is not a hollow romp, like a good Netflix movie ought be, but hallowing, in that it dresses up in a costume, wears your skin and goes “Boo! Did I scare you?” 

The part of the movie that was in Jersey was good. 2 stars.