6 UNDERGROUND (2019)

Michael Bay’s first Netflix offering is somewhat of a predictable one. This comic action flick follows a team of ‘ghosts’, a squad of vigilantes who have long been dead in the public eye and who are funded by their charismatic leader, One (Ryan Reynolds). Rather than using their names, they resort to numbers, up to the titular ‘Six’. The movie actually starts with slight promise. A car chase set in the Italian city of Florence showcases a significant amount of Bayhem, albeit a slightly more gory one that Transformers has to offer. Bay struggles to introduce the entire team in a seamless manner with Four (Ben Hardy) and Three’s (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) entries seeming quite tacked on. They remain distanced from the action, while the other four (including Reynolds) are very much in the center of the excitement, due to the fact they are the ones being chased.

After this, the film comes to a standstill for quite a while. Insistent on making the audience like these characters, Bay spends a lot of time flashing back and forth in an attempt to flesh everyone out. He instead departs from the main storyline for quite a while and ends up failing to promote any of the team from mere caricatures. In fact, you could say the next act of the film was a waste of time. Bay slightly brings it back together with the second set piece - an infiltration and extraction of an important diplomat. The majority of the team get some sort of redeeming moment, yet it is one that exemplifies the fact Bay should’ve kept their backgrounds a mystery. The team are infinitely more interesting when they are ‘ghosts’, instead of when they bring their personal relationships into the mix.

The film falters once again and the final act is a bit of a mess, completely undoing what little good there was to be found in the opening sequence. At the end of the day, this is Reynolds' film. As the leader of the team, we get to spend a bit more time with him at the helm of everything and his Deadpool-esque quips are a redeeming grace. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say much for the film that Reynolds probably ad-libbed the majority of its best lines. A lacklustre explosion of meaningless action that only gets worse as it progresses. Reynolds does his best to hold it together but with so many lead characters to juggle, what good he provides gets lost in the mess. Score: 40/100