6 Underground

There are some truly evil people in the world; some who sadly have the money and power to evade the law. We all have those fantasies of taking them down. We all want to make the world a better place by killing them. That’s why we have vigilante films; so we can see what it would be like if we could take out those bad guys in a glorious fashion. And that’s what director Michael Bay and Ryan Reynolds bring to us in their first Netflix production, 6 Underground.

Reynolds headlines as the enigmatic One, a billionaire who faked his own death in order to take down the world’s most notorious criminals. But he’s not working alone. Along with him are others who have grown tired of the limitations of society; each with the skills One needs to form the perfect team. Together they work to take down a tyrannical dictator, truly pushing the limits of what they can do as human beings.

We all know how Michael Bay movies are; they’re mostly bad. They may appeal to those looking for a mindless sensory overload, but even dumb movies need to have some smarts. Unfortunately, 6 Underground is no different. It’s a too mindless movie whose lack of logic, structure, and visual creativity amount to a $150 million student film. It’s hard to enjoy a film when you can’t even figure out what the film is about.

Despite how big this movie is, there’s a surprisingly lack of basic story structure. This film fails to follow even the simplest, yet most important, points of setting up a good story. The opening action sequence lasts 20 minutes, followed by so much focus on character/franchise setup that it’s easy to forget who’s the bad guy, what their mission is, or what this movie is even about. Or even, why are we still watching?

Seriously, the whole movie is essentially; someone gives an overly long exposition dump, someone gets blown away, two characters have a sex scene, and repeat, with some action every once in a while. For two hours, exposition, blood, sex, repeat.

What’s even more hilarious is the fact that the film just forgets about the character setup halfway through. We get the backstory for some of the main characters, but once we get into the big set piece action in Hong Kong, it just forgets to give us the rest of them. It’s not like we needed to know the backstory of every single character, but it’s funny how the movie can’t even commit itself to do that.

This movie can’t even give us a reason to root for the main characters. We never get any backstory on Reynolds’s character, and the others’ are so scrambled that we don’t really get a sense of who they are, despite spending so much time trying to do just that. As such, we never get enough reasons why we would want the characters to survive and complete their mission, or why we would want to spend an entire franchise with them.

One might want to think about restraining Bay to a PG-13 rating, because this movie earns its R rating in all of the worst ways. Right from the start, any time someone gets hit with a bullet, or any kind of weapon, they burst into an explosion of blood and guts. They even focus on one guy’s severed eyeball for 5 minutes straight. That kind of casual gore gets tiring to watch after a while.

There’s really not much else to say without spoiling anything. That’s how little story there is. 6 Underground is Michael Bay as usual; where loads of things go boom and everyone hates each other. As such, that also means a complete absence of story, human characters, any form of logic, or any real reason to keep watching. Fans of his movies will no doubt be entertained by this, but all others will only be shocked by how confusing it is. If there’s one good thing about this movie, it’s that, aside from a Netflix subscription, you don’t have to pay to see this.