Action In Excess Is the Downfall of ‘6 Underground’

Wham! Bam! Wham! Bam! Imagine those sounds in the loudest volume repeated again and again, and that pretty much summarises what 6 Underground is like. I walked out of the screening with my head spinning. There isn’t a single frame in the film that was static and my ears were ringing because of the incessant and unbearably loud background score. Basically this Michael Bay film was a two-and-a-half-hour assault on my senses.

6 Underground has been directed by Michael Bay the man behind films like the Transformers series and Pearl Harbour. The film is an action film in the truest sense because there’s just so much of it that there is barely any conversation between characters.

The premise of 6 Underground is fairly simple, 6 people from across the globe including a doctor, a hitman, a rich businessman pretend to be dead so that they can be off the radar and fight ‘evil’. The leader is Ryan Reynolds, who is his usual funny self, and together they take on the many goons of the world trying to destroy it.

These good guys are of course demolishing dozens of cars and buildings amidst trying to avert these ‘evil forces’. There’s blood and gore galore, to the extent where there’s a scene where an eyeball (yes!) is being tossed around in a car. Not a pretty sight at all.

The characters draw up a list of 9 people they want to get rid of, guys who are crooks. 6 Underground though focuses only on one story - of eliminating the corrupt leader of a country called Turgistan. This vigilante squad fights tooth and nail to make sure they triumph, and they all have numbers versus a name. So at any given point in the film someone is screaming “One! Four! Six!”, but you’ll probably ignore that because of all the other cacophony in the film.

I know that a film like this is supposed to be looked at as a ‘popcorn flick’, and not to be taken very seriously. But is that an excuse to have ‘RELENTLESS’ action, without delving into the minds of any of the characters? These guys have backstories, and not more than a minute is spent in explaining them because....the next action scene is almost here!

I may seem like a hater of action, but I’m not. All I ask for is that you give me some reason to root for the good guys to succeed in their mission. Midway through 6 Underground, I was quite okay with the possibility of all of them dying. Oops!

Ryan Reynolds gets some funny moments, when he and his squad members are not speeding away on the streets of Venice. Which reminds me that there was just so much racing, it just went on and on and on! Reynolds is charming and gets into ‘star’ mode well, those slo-mo shots were eye catching, but beyond that the 6 Underground doesn’t want him to do much. My favourite performance is by Ben Hardy who plays “Four”, for most part he was suspended from the air or running on the edge of different buildings. Spiderman has a new nemesis? The other actors like Adria Arjona, Melanie Laurent seem puzzled by the silliness of the film. I hear you!

Maybe this genre of film is just not for me, I enjoy something like the Fast and Furious series or even Angelina Jolie’s Salt. These are also action films, but seated in some kind of drama. Michael Bay clearly doesn’t want to create that, which is why I wonder why they’d choose to release it on Netflix where people can shut it any point? The impact of a film like 6 Underground would seem more probable as a theatrical experience.

But then I guess that those of you who will be watching this film on Netflix will not have to suffer the banging and crashing that I did at the screening. The only saving grace of the film were some dazzling action pieces, but then again SOOOO many of them that I forgot which ones I liked. Too much of anything is bad, right Mr Bay?