6 Underground review: Leaves Michael Bay’s worst impulses completely unchecked

It’s a Netflix action film that lets its audience gorge on violence and bravado, only to make us feel sick of the taste by the final reel

Clarisse Loughrey
Friday 13 December 2019 10:18 GMT
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6 Underground official trailer starring Ryan Reynold

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Michael Bay never needed Netflix. His ultra-macho style of filmmaking is already so ingrained in Hollywood's mainstream that he had no use for a streaming service that prides itself on handing over complete control to directors. But we’ve still somehow ended up with 6 Underground, a film that demonstrates perfectly what happens when Bay’s impulses are left completely unchecked. It’s a film that lets its audience gorge on violence and bravado, only to make us feel sick of the taste by the final reel.

Things start out promising, with a delirious car chase through the streets of Florence, Italy. A group of vigilantes, led by Ryan Reynolds’s mysterious billionaire “One”, are bundled into a lime green sportscar as it swerves out of the path of babies and puppies. A multi-tiered wedding cake isn’t as lucky; neither are the bystanders who don’t happen to look like Peroni calendar models. The sequence finally ends with a quick drive through the world-famous Uffizi Gallery, with Michelangelo’s David nearly knocked off its pedestal. There are fountains of blood and a detached eyeball. It’s magnificent and grotesque in equal measure – a slice of maximalist excellence.

But it’s all interrupted by that inconvenient thing called a plot, as the film unravels over the course of multiple flashbacks and sidetracks. We learn how “One” assembled his crew of deadly misfits, brought together to do what he claims world governments cannot – stop the real “evil motherf***ers”. That said, it’s hard to tell what Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese’s script is actually about. Does it want us to put our faith in ultra-wealthy individuals instead of elected officials? Is it a capitalist fever dream? Or just anarchy? The team’s main mission is to topple the dictator of Turgistan (the name of a real province in the ancient Sasanian Empire, now used to denote a fictional, stereotypically Middle Eastern country). They plan to do so by freeing his democracy-loving brother (A Separation’s Payman Maadi) and kickstarting a coup d'état. Yet, in the same breath, it’s revealed that the US were the ones to install this dictator in the first place. Is 6 Underground attempting to criticise western interventionism while also gleefully supporting it?

Who knows. It’s impossible to tell what the film’s about – or what’s going on in any given moment – with it being edited this furiously. Although we’re used to Bay’s films cutting constantly between different angles, 6 Underground borders on parody. It’s also a tonal disaster. Wernick and Reese are best known for writing Reynolds’s aggressively irreverent dialogue in the Deadpool films. They throw the actor a few choice lines here, but it’s hard to stomach the references to Eighties sitcoms when they’re here being contrasted with scenes of gas attacks and refugee camps.

Granted, 6 Underground is chaotic and absurd enough that it might actually suit Netflix. Perhaps that’s its purpose: to be viewed during a bleary, Sunday morning hangover – when all movement and colour is a welcome distraction.

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