6 Underground (2019)

Streaming Service: Netflix

Movie Name/Year: 6 Underground (2019)

Genre: Action, Adventure, Comedy

Length: 128 minutes

Rating: R

Production/Distribution: Bay Films, Skydance Media, Netflix

Director: Michael Bay

Writer: Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese

Actors: Ryan Reynolds, Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ben Hardy, Adria Arjona, Dave Franco, Corey Hawkins, Lior Raz, Payman Maadi, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Kim Kold, Lidia Franco, James Murray, Lukhanyo Bele, George Kareman, James Carroll Jordan, Ron Funches, Daniel Adegboyega

Blurb from IMDb: Meet a new kind of action hero. Six untraceable agents, totally off the grid. They've buried their pasts so they can change the future.

Selina’s Point of View:

This was definitely directed by Michael Bay (Transformers, Bad Boys II, Pearl Harbor). It was absolutely everything you expect from a Bay movie. At the end of a long day, preferably a bad one, this is the movie you would turn on just to see the fireballs. It was a loud, turn your brain off, explosion-filled action flick. Nothing more, nothing less.

That’s the thing with a Bay movie. No one’s trying to reinvent the wheel in them. It’s just meant to be cathartic fun. Critics are rarely going to enjoy something like this because it’s not giving you a deep, personal, plot. That’s not what it’s meant to do.

In this case, it gives you the chance to live through the mostly shallow main characters. You get to watch them become nothing in order to do something. In the current fucked up climate of the world, I think some of us need that. It’s too easy to feel impotent in a reality where only the rich, famous and/or powerful get a voice. When it gets too heavy, you get to turn on a bloody action flick and watch someone blow up a dictator.

As much as I’m standing up for it, I can’t completely ignore its flaws.

It was very long.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll sit through a three-hour Marvel flick without so much as a word of annoyance. But as action-packed as those films are, there’s usually a significant plot and character arc going on. In this case, the beginning is just a twenty-minute long car chase. It was a fun chase at the beginning, but then it just seemed to drag on forever.

Many of scenes were like that. Sometimes it felt like a lot could have been cut, not just without losing the feel of the film as a whole – but while making it better in the long run. It could have easily been released as a 90-minute movie.

If you read this blog often, then you know I’m a hardcore Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, Buried) fan. As expected, he and the rest of his cast did great, but it felt a little like they were just playing cut and paste characters from other heist films. The script seemed to devolve into pop culture references after a while, too.

Even with those flaws, I didn’t hate it. I’ve had a rough week. A pipe blew in my kitchen and my daughter’s sick for the third time this season, among other things. So, I think I was just in the right mood to turn off my brain and watch things go boom.

It worked out.

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – 37%

Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score – 61%

Metascore – 41/100

Metacritic User Score – 5.6/10

IMDB Score – 6.1/10

CinemaScore – None

Trust the Dice: Selina’s Rating – 3.5/5

P.S. Short scene after the credits start.

Movie Trailer: