The Union

Director Julian Farino’s “The Union” follows Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a construction worker content with his job, dive bar outings with his friends, and sleeping with his former seventh-grade teacher (an awkward joke that remains a punchline over the course of the film’s entirety). When his adolescent flame, Roxanne (Halle Berry) returns to the east coast after decades of no contact, what he thinks is a meet cute down memory lane turns into an international intelligence operation. 

Hackers have accessed the personal information of all of the Western world’s government employees, from soldiers to cops and the FBI. Agent Roxanne and her cut-to-the-chase boss Tom (J.K. Simmons) are spearheading the mission to retrieve the hack to prevent it from getting in the wrong hands. Their titular organization, The Union, is a small, highly secretive agency within the government, akin to the operations of the CIA. They’re “an invisible army that keeps the world running,” an agency that looks for street-smart, blue collar individuals who fly under the radar. Kidnapping Mike from New Jersey to London, Roxanne enlists his help for this high-stakes assignment for one sole reason: “He’s a nobody.” It’s a flimsy premise that precedes an equally thin film.