You think you know some people.
As if it weren’t surprising enough for Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg) that his long-lost high school sweetheart, Roxanne (Halle Berry), is now a spy working for an elite government organization, he’s soon also dealing with a series of double-crosses. As The Union reaches its explosive finale, Mike and Roxanne contend with some unpleasant twists and turns — and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Construction worker Mike might seem an unlikely recruit for the special forces, but The Union isn’t your average secret agency. “Everybody loves Bond,” Wahlberg tells Tudum. “We realized that maybe we’re not going to get a chance to be James Bond, so what if we made our own version of a blue-collar James Bond?” That’s The Union: a superspy team of ordinary joes who have more street smarts than book smarts.
“The Union does the dirty work for the CIA and FBI,” Berry told Netflix. “They’re blue-collar workers, everyday people who get plucked by The Union to be trained to shoot and do combat intelligence and tactical weaponry. They learn all of these specialty skills, but they’re really just average people, and that’s what makes them so different.”
The Union’s plot kicks off when one of those everyday people — Roxanne’s partner, Nick (Mike Colter) — is killed trying to intercept some important intel. With bad guys on their heels, The Union will need a new team member to help them infiltrate a top-secret auction and recover its files before it’s too late.
Enter Mike. “He's still living at home, still working at the same job, still hanging out at the same bar with the same friends,” Wahlberg says. “He’s been waiting there in that same spot, hoping that Roxanne is going to walk through that door, and he’ll get one more chance to show her that he’s worthy.” When that chance comes, Mike is dragged off on the adventure of a lifetime, starting with a whirlwind training program.
When the time comes to finish the job, though, Roxanne is in for an unpleasant surprise. It turns out Nick is alive — but not quite the way she remembered him. “Nick has not only been a part of The Union, but he’s also been in it for a while,” Colter tells Tudum. “He’s like, ‘I’ve kind of outgrown this. I think I can do even bigger and better things, or I think I can do something that’s more for me.’ ”
Nick has fallen in with Juliet (Jessica De Gouw), the auctioneer who’s selling off Union intel to the highest bidder. He’s in this for the money, The Union be damned. “That will be hopefully a surprise for the audience,” Berry says, “when they find out what a snake he was.”
With the team’s headquarters targeted, Mike and Roxanne have to go back to basics to save the day. Fortunately, they get some help from one of Mike’s old Jersey buddies; they’re secreted out of the country on a last-ditch mission to intercept Nick and Juliet, who are on their way to sell The Union’s information to a terror cell. A desperate car chase ensues.
In the film’s major action scenes, Mike and Mark shared a similar dilemma — keeping up. “Anytime I was like, ‘Well, I don’t really need to do this stunt or that stunt,’ she’d just give me that look, and I’d be like, ‘OK, well I guess I better do it. I’m going to get called out here,’ ” Wahlberg says. The final action scene was easier on the actor than his earlier sparring sequences with Berry. “She hit me with a shot that I felt in a way that I hadn’t felt [before],” Wahlberg says, laughing. “I’ve done many fight scenes, boxing movies, boxed in real life. And I never felt a shot like that.”
Of course, that’s not the only impact Roxanne makes on Mike. “We got to do action, but we also got to do the complexity of a [romantic] relationship, and we got to work out that relationship,” Berry says. “The fact that they’re exes meant that something was amiss in the relationship, and we, in a lightweight way, got to deal with that.”
And deal with it they do, dispatching Nick and recovering the intel just in time to stop the sale. All in a day’s work for a few Union reps.
Berry and Wahlberg have been friends for more than 30 years, but this is their first film together — a fact highlighted by the youthful (real-life) photos of the pair that scroll over the closing credits. “You get with someone that you just like very much, you have chemistry with, that you trust, and then you get to go to fun places because you feel like you can authentically be who you are and they support you in that,” Berry says. “And I think we did that for each other.”
The Union is now streaming on Netflix.
