Having finally gotten the Transformers bug out of his system for good, Michael Bay could finally get back to what was really important: Blowing up cars without feeling bad about it because cars aren’t people.
After leaving the Transformers series, Bay signed on to direct two feature films. The first of those would be 6 Underground, produced by Skydance Media1 and distributed by Netflix in that little window of time where Netflix gave a ridiculous amount of money to pretty much anyone who asked. (In this case $150 million.) The second film, the long-in-the-works Robopocalypse, has still yet to materialize, but we’ll talk about that next time. For now, we have 6 Underground, a film that sees Michael Bay seemingly unmoored from the shackles of PG-13 filmmaking, as well as any semblance of how to properly structure a feature film. Buckle up, kiddos.
6 Underground follows the exploits of a clandestine team of agents who have all faked their own deaths in order to work outside the confines of legal and political red tape. In other words, they’re an A-Team of secret agents who answer only to themselves. (It’s a perfect metaphor for Michael Bay no longer having to play by Steven Spielberg’s rules.) In order to maintain anonymity, they all go by a number. The leader of the team, One (Ryan Reynolds) is a billionaire who uses his wealth2 to fund the team. Their mission is to take down Rovach Alimov (Lior Raz), the ruthless dictator of Turgistan, a made-up Middle Eastern country, after One witnesses him bombing his own citizens with chemical weapons. (Don’t worry too much about that, it’s just an excuse for Ryan Reynolds to play Tony Stark.)
One’s team consists of:
- Two (Mélanie Laurent), a self-described CIA spook,
- Three (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the team’s hitman and Two’s lover,
- Four (Ben Hardy), a British parkour expert who only ever gets the snot beaten out of him,
- Five (Adria Arjona), the team doctor (who I’m not sure is actually a doctor), and
- Six (Dave Franco), the team’s wheelman who dies at the end of the opening car chase.
That car chase goes on for twenty uninterrupted minutes as Six drives the team in a puke green Alfa Romeo through the streets, back alleys, and museum spaces of Florence, Italy. Honestly, it’s the highlight of the entire film. Cars careen every which way, bodies go flying, everything explodes in a hail of sparks and broken glass. It’s a wild symphony of nonsense and you can feel Bay behind the camera enjoying every last bit of it. There’s one great slow-motion shot where the team’s car drifts around a public square, and we look on in agony as the car narrowly misses a pair of dogs, a lady holding a baby, and a flock of pigeons that fly up in iconic Bay fashion (where for some reason he can’t resist the urge to add a CGI pigeon hitting the woman square in the face). It’s hilarious.
Unfortunately, Six doesn’t make it out alive. One has to go out and recruit a replacement in the form of Seven (Corey Hawkins), a retired Delta Force sniper whose regret over losing his team in Afghanistan is all the reason he needs to fake his own death and join this team. (Why they decide to replace a driver with a sniper is never explained.) Seven becomes the heart of the team, because he bristles at the idea that One refuses to let them bond and get to know one another. It’s a nice dynamic that the film doesn’t do quite enough with, outside of Two and Three’s little will-they-won’t-they tryst.
The rest of the film finds the team planning their coup in stages: Assassinating Alimov’s generals during a night of debauchery in Las Vegas; kidnapping Alimov’s brother Murat (Payman Maadi) from his fortified high-rise apartment in Hong Kong; and finally overthrowing him and installing Murat as the new leader.
Of course, when I write it all out like that it seems fairly straightforward. In reality it’s extremely convoluted, as the film is seeded with so many flashbacks and asides about each member of the team that the timeline ultimately makes no sense. I actually had to consult the plot breakdown on Wikipedia to get my facts straight for this, which was a first. The script3 really takes a shotgun approach to doling out its character beats. It doesn’t want us knowing too much about the team until it absolutely does, prefacing each flashback with that team member’s number in a giant block font on the screen. It’s the kind of thing that feels like a studio note from Netflix. “We need the film to periodically pause for a beat and drop a big thudding sound so people looking at their phones will know they’re about to learn something important.”
My main issue with this film is that it simply doesn’t know what it wants to be. Does it want us to take it seriously, like whenever Bay drops into 13 Hours mode during the firefights and nonsensical political talk? Or does it want us to laugh along with Ryan Reynolds, Bad Boys-style, as he smugly farts out exposition, constantly referencing other movies (and for some reason “Leave It To Beaver”)? The truth winds up somewhere in between, as the latter half of the film is never quite as over-the-top silly as that opening car chase, but still silly enough that ‘parkour’ is a valuable skill in this scenario. The ending itself is amazingly sloppy, jumping from an invasion of Turgistan’s capitol city to an evening raid on Alimov’s yacht in a matter of seconds. It’s a film made for Netflix watching, where you can ignore most of what happens until a gunfight breaks out, and unless you’re just really into gunfights, you can probably ignore that too.
6 Underground was conceived as the start of a potential franchise for Netflix. As of 2024 that dream is officially dead. I could’ve seen this working as a series, and maybe that’s what it should have been. Michael Bay isn’t in the TV business, though, so what we’re left with is a film that ultimately has no reason for being. The joys of this film are purely visceral. The car chases are top notch, and it’s genuinely fun watching Bay take a large budget and stage ridiculous physical stunts with it. Unfortunately, you have to stitch those things together with plot points told in the correct order, which is where it all goes sideways. It’s nice seeing actors I like getting work4, but good god, at least give them something to do.
NEXT TIME: Michael Bay’s COVID movie.
- Skydance, it should be noted, has worked closely with Paramount Pictures for years. So it’s little wonder that Bay, who directed five Transformers movies for Paramount, would fall in with another Paramount partner.
↩︎ - In a flashback we discover that he made his fortune inventing a new type of super-magnet. Also, his real name is Magnet Johnson. I am not kidding.
↩︎ - Credited to Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool buddies Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Which explains “Magnet Johnson”.
↩︎ - I actually got this movie confused with Triple Frontier, the other 2019 Netflix movie about a team of soldiers that also, somehow, stars Adria Arjona. ↩︎
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