Michael Bay’s career stretches back to the humble beginnings of the 90’s music video era, directing hits for singers like Tina Turner and Meatloaf. His first feature film was the mega-hit Bad Boys, propelling his and Will Smith’s respective careers into the stratosphere and subsequently starting his path to become one of the most universally rueful directors who continually produces massive hits year after year. Almost 25 years later, we finally see Michael Bay given carte blanche, thanks to Netflix’s seemingly endless pockets and no real desire for quality control. What we get cannot even be described in a single word. Much more than ‘Bayhem’, 6 Underground consists of all the infamous Bay trademarks that have propelled his idiosyncratic career: sustained formalistic Michael Mann practical action within a thinly stretched story, crude humor, wonky politics, a repetitive plot, and of course: explosions. It also happens to be one of the best action movies of the year.
The “story” (if it can even be called that) of 6 Underground centers around a brilliant billionaire (Ryan Reynolds) who fakes his own death to lead a team of rogue international mercenaries – a group of ghosts designed to do the jobs that world governments refuse to do. Opening with a job gone wrong in Florence, Italy, the team recruits a former sniper battling PTSD to forge a military coup, deposing the authoritarian leader of Turgistan and replacing him with his democratic brother.
6 Underground begins with the greatest action set-piece of the year and never lets up from frame one. Bay’s trademark of endless explosions and practical plastic inevitability may produce an eye-roll for most fans, but it is also a gift that very few in the turgid digital age of Marvel can pull off. The opening scene is pure Bay, from dick jokes, to Nuns violently waving their middle fingers, to innocent civilian bodies flying, to a severed eye-ball getting passed through a speeding neon green Lamborghini – you get the point. There’s even a scene that implies Bay thinks Dave Franco is famous enough to be Janet-Leighed. In truth, the scene, just like most of the film, is a rapid-fire gloriously crass cluster of violence and awry character. As the film moves from one standout American action set-piece to another, the film somehow maintains this maniacal pacing interweaved with droll expository information and the film’s ultimate enemy: plot. Even 6 Underground’s central politics are so backward, in-bred, and twisted that only the ultimate bad-taste American Maestro like Bay could pull it off. The film carries over the morally reprehensible American ideology of the military state from the Iraq war. It is so formally reprehensible that it almost somehow almost twists itself back around again into a complex companion to Zero Dark Thirty.
6 Underground‘s loose and messy structure perfectly matches Bay’s sensibilities. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the infamous (and extremely rich) writers of such “comedic classics” as Zombieland and Deadpool barely know where to take the film. The first half of the film is entirely set around flashbacks and set pieces. The back half is entirely set up fake emotional engagements and set-piece. Even calling this a story is a stretch. Yet somehow, theirs (and Ryan Reynolds) stylistic traits match perfectly with the breakneck tackiness of a Michael Bay Netflix adventure.
3.5/5 STARS