In 6 Underground, One (Ryan Reynolds) is a tech billionaire. During a routine PR shoot in Turgistan – Syria with the serial numbers shaved off – the dictator of the country arbitrarily launches a gas attack against aide workers, One included. Infuriated at the injustice, One fakes his own death in a Red Bull-sponsored stunt-flying accident and puts his vast wealth towards recruiting a small team of disillusioned, thrill-seeking operatives. Together, they have a plan to lead a coup in Turgistan, over-throwing the dictator and replacing him with his “democracy-loving brother.” Because nothing says democracy like an American billionaire murdering government officials and then just appointing the new leader himself.
But this is the kind of movie where democracy isn’t something you do; it’s something you are. It’s Americana, not political philosophy. Bad guys are snarling leches – fat or old, which, in a Michael Bay movie, means a lech and a slob who doesn’t deserve to fuck beautiful women, but gets to because all women are for sale. Beautiful women are objects in a Victoria’s Secret calendar, universally ending sex scenes immaculately posed in fresh lingerie. It’s the moral and intellectual depth of a Saturday morning cartoon shot through the lens of Michael Bay’s deeply horny nihilism.
How else can I explain the ending, which tries to wrap up this ultra-violent joke fest with a montage about, essentially, the friends we made along the way. Which, if played for laughs, could actually be a really funny, subversive way to end a movie about a group of sociopaths overthrowing a government. But Michael Bay is incapable of ‘jokes’. He has heard of them. But he does not make jokes. And so the ending of the movie, written (presumably) as a joke, lands with a staggering thud.
“I would’ve let you pull that trigger.”
Let’s talk about violence. Michael Bay made his name with a frenetic, visceral style of action storytelling that has, I think, taken a severe critical blow after a decade of Transformers nonsense. At times, 6 Underground feels like a video game, featuring five playable characters, platforming challenges, and stylistic executions. There are a lot of stylistic executions. And Michael Bay is a gifted stylist working with a talented stunt team, so some of them actually work, sort of.
But Michael Bay is, again, a deeply nihilistic director, and pairing him with the writers from Deadpool turns out to be… let’s call it tonal overload. The film opens with a massive car chase, so frenetically shot and edited it often borders on impossible to tell what is happening. Until one of the baddies gets killed, of course. Those are lovingly captured. They don’t just die. Their bodies fly out and pancake into other vehicles. A car sideswipes them with a visceral thud. Who are these people? I don’t know. Why is this happening? I don’t know. They’re bad guys. They deserve this.
Again: Are these jokes? They feel like jokes. But the language of the movie says: This is awesome. Check out these ragdoll physics. They look great. But when you can barely tell who is doing what or why, it’s hard to care. It’s frenetic, but not exciting. Michael Bay has always been an overactive director, but his earliest hits were at least visually coherent. This is just applying his Transformers visual style to a rote post-military shooter. Has more than a decade of pixelated nonsense finally, truly stolen Bay’s signature style? It seems like it might have.
“Eagle’s landed. Love that movie line.”
Let me give you a feel for the sense of humor of the film. During the Hong Kong raid, Three gets dosed with nitrous and spends the raid relentlessly making movie references. Not even references. He just quotes movie lines verbatim and out of context. It’s about as funny as you might imagine. Two shoots a couple baddies; cue Three, cue “I see dead people,” cue laughter.
It also defines the general sense of humor of the film, which ranges from “7th grade football player” to “11th grade lacrosse player.” It’s the kind of sense of humor that thinks the height of comedy is Borat quotes and hilariously mangled human bodies. Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, two writers who followed Reynolds from Deadpool, are helpless in the more grounded – a term I am using incredibly loosely here – world. Deadpool gave them a Looney Toons-esque playground, where anything could happen for a gag. The writers lack the confidence to apply that same aesthetic here, so… references.
The thing is, they could have stuck with that aesthetic. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor pulled it off in Crank and Crank: High Voltage. There, you had two directors who knew that their penchant for cartoonishly-exaggerated violence, stereotyping, and laughably terse machismo would be neutered and deeply toxic in a more realistic world. So… they just amped everything up. Bay’s cinematic style occasionally evokes Crank here, particularly in its hyperactive-even-for-Michael-Bay editing, but the script is just too plain.
“Las Vegas has more facial recognition software than any place on Earth.”
Nothing exemplifies the lackluster imagination of the film, for me, more than the Las Vegas sequence. The crew intends to assassinate four generals in a hotel room. But, because their mission depends on secrecy, they don’t want to be seen. One sets up the problem for the crew: There is a ton of facial recognition software in Las Vegas, and that footage will be heavily picked over after the mass slaughter of foreign dignitaries. What solution does the gang come up with?
Wigs and fake noses. Not even good ones. Nothing inventive, no cool set piece idea, just a reference to a famous tennis player. Another fucking reference.
Look, if you’re in the mood for Michael Bay’s brand of meathead machismo, this is better than Transformers stuff. I mean, it plays a techno remix of O Fortuna while they drive through a museum, smashing antiquities, so it has some so-batshit-it’s-fun qualities, at least. But is it Bad Boys? Is it Pain & Gain? No. And it sure as shit isn’t Crank. While it has all of Michael Bay’s signature style, Wernick and Reese just can’t handle the more grounded tone of the work. Instead, they let Bay wallow in his most nakedly nihilistic tendency in a largely imagination-free script. 6 Underground is a movie made for you to half-watch while you switch between browsing Instagram and Twitter. It’s not Polar-bad, but it’s still just the eighth-best action movie of 2006.
6 Underground is out now exclusively on Netflix. Written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese and directed by Michael Bay, 6 Underground stars Ryan Reynolds, Melanie Laurent, and Corey Hawkins.