6 Underground

6 UNDERGROUND - NETFLIX

In the words of Ryan Reynolds himself, “The most Michael Bay movie Michael Bay ever Michael Bayed.” 6 Underground is a 150M dollar NETFLIX exclusive that follows six untraceable agents who are totally off the grid after erasing their pasts to protect the future.

It is easy to tell when Michael Bay is invested in a project — Bad Boys series and Pain & Gain — or when he is just picking up a paycheque, or Baycheque if you will, with the Transformers franchise. With 6 Underground, he throws every trait that he is known for at the camera in the opening fifteen minutes. The whole sequence is thrilling, a pure blast of utter chaos: cars flip and crash spraying glass and parts everywhere, statues are obliterated and bystanders are crushed. The set pieces are memorable and feature some stylistic, inventive and bloody kills, shootouts and fights. With Bay being free from the restrictive age ratings of the Transformers movies, he can unleash some filthy and visceral murder.

The cast is clearly all enjoying themselves here. Reynolds has excellent comedic timing, as we know, and is very much playing a role similar to that of Deadpool and his character in The Hitman’s Bodyguard. He fits the bill of a typical Bay movie action hero as billionaire ‘One’. The rest of the cast each have a skill which they bring to the team: free-running, sniping, driving and gun fighting. These team members have no real depth aside from their essential traits and tropes — essentially, they are uninteresting; the dictator villain is also wholly forgettable and bland.

What lets this film down is the story and the writing. The script is exceptionally cheesy. Not every joke lands and there is a section featuring movie/TV quotes and references also featuring an Eminem lyric joke, which all do not work and feel outdated — especially the latter. The premise seems relatively basic. However, it is extraordinarily convoluted and confusingly put together with frequent time jumps. Each character receives a flashback with sometimes there being flashbacks within flashbacks, which are messily edited together and work against the film by g tbh make it more confusing.

NETFLIX pushing the level of Bayness of this film to a maximum certainly has its positives and negatives. The quick cutting and shaky cam are unnecessary at times and headache-inducing; the lighting and lens flair is overly done. It is not all bad, there are small instances of creative editing present with well-shot cinematography and implementation of slow motion. The soundtrack this filled with mostly irritating songs that do not always fit what is happening on screen and the obnoxious and on-the-nose brand advertising is in full force.

6 Underground is a pile up of destruction. Bay is having a complete blast disregarding all human life, delivering bloody insanity and creating a spectacle of carnage filled to the brim with vulgarity. However, the bland nonsensical plot and poor dialogue with uninteresting, generic characters and the negative Bay-isms does let it down. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the movie is a lot of fun.

6 Underground streams exclusively on NETFLIX December 13th 2019