‘The Union’ explained: Why is Mike recruited to the mission?
The latest action flick exclusive to Netflix has been making waves on the platform’s global chart this month. Julian Farino’s comedy thriller The Union sees Mark Wahlberg star as unsuspecting everyman Mike McKenna, and Halle Berry as the secret agent and high school sweetheart who drags him into a mission to save the Western world’s classified intelligence data.
In a formulaic imitation of Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman series, Mike gets roped into a private intelligence agency with a mysterious name, doing the work that deep state agencies can’t – or don’t want to. As Berry’s character Roxanne puts it, The Union is like the FBI, “except we do all the work.” Roxanne is the film’s point of divergence from Kingsman, as she doubles up as both Mike’s senior partner and his love interest. She’s the woman who left him behind to go to college, only to run into him in his local bar all these years later.
But Roxanne isn’t just there to rekindle a childhood flame, she and Mike have work to do. And so, she duly shoots him in the neck with a tranquiliser and ships him off to London, where the two of them work on recovering stolen intel from mercenary agents, under the auspices of Union founder Tom Brennan.
Mike’s inexperience leads him to botch the mission, as he accidentally breaks the phone on which the stolen data is stored in a sink full of water while fighting off a Russian combatant. Still, with a new lead, Roxanne gives him a second chance to prove himself.
They end up intercepting the data during a negotiation between treacherous double agent Nick Faraday, who happens to be Roxanne’s ex-husband, and an Iranian terror cell. Faraday wants to sell the classified information to the Iranians for millions of dollars. But Mike and Roxanne have other ideas, as a death-defying struggle for the briefcase containing the classified data breaks out across the streets of Trieste.
Finally, a car chase brings the two heroes and their antagonist to the end of the road, at the Piran lighthouse in Slovenia. Roxanne holds her nerve and shoots her ex-husband dead. And she and Mike rekindle their relationship, although hold off on sealing it with a kiss, for now.
But why does Roxanne choose Mike?
At first, it seems like a bizarre premise to recruit New Jersey construction worker Mike, who has no police, military or intelligence training of any kind, to The Union. At least Kingsman’s “Eggsy” Unwin is a seasoned street criminal with plenty of skills he can apply to spying.
Yet Brennan soon explains that Mike’s lack of experience in the field is the whole point. “Here’s the rub, Mike,” he tells him. “We need somebody clean. So we need somebody with no history.” For the mission they’re undertaking to recover stolen data on every single intelligence officer and soldier in the Western world, they need someone whose information doesn’t show up within that data set. “Basically, we need a nobody,” Roxanne says bluntly.
When pressed by Mike on why it had to be him she contacted, she expands on her reasoning, suggesting that it wasn’t just their personal history that made her think of them for the job. “A guy who can be on a tiny beam a thousand feet in the air and keep his cool,” she explains, “who used to be an all-star athlete. A guy I remembered I could count on.”
Mike’s ability to use a high beam comes in handy during one of the fight scenes in Trieste, when he overcomes two Iranian combatants while balancing on two planks of wood bridging the roofs of two many-storeyed buildings. He also proves loyalty and dependability by insisting that he finishes what he started after messing up the first part of the mission.
Regardless of Roxanne’s explanation, it might seem like Mike’s bitten off a little more than he can chew for most of the movie. Wahlberg and Berry make a decent all-action double act, though, and for its many limitations, The Union is good, no-frills fun for a lazy Saturday night.