Current Events > Watched 6 Underground

(+) Yeah! (+)

Now that was an absolute mess.

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was it a good mess?

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It was a tiring mess.

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I made a huge post on my laptop, but lost track of time and had to run.

In short, it's a Michael Bay movie. Confusing, frenetic, amoral. Makes me feel better about good movies I've seen this year.

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Okay, my post saved, so to break it down a little further.

The movie is an action film starring Ryan Reynolds. The plot is that he leads a group of mercenaries united by a cause to do the things that governments are too cowardly or too bureaucratic to do, which in this case means deposing the dictator of "Turgistan", a fictional Middle-Eastern country, and install his democracy-oriented brother.

The whole deal behind each member of the team is that they're legally dead. In order for Ryan Reynolds ("One") to bring them on the team, they had to fake their own death, which according to One, means that they're now ghosts and have the freedom to do whatever they want without any kind of need for legal red tape or being identified. This doesn't seem to account for the fact that records or photographic evidence might exist of these people to identify them, but the movie hopes you're not thinking about that. One is a billionaire, so don't even worry your pretty little head about how they afford all this stuff, either.

Anyway, #6 dies on their first mission in the film and #1 goes to find a #7, who ends up being a sniper from the military, which is where we get Michael Bay's trademark "soldiers awesome, command/politicians bad" trope, because back in Afghanistan he was once ordered not to take a shot which ended up costing him his entire squad.

We also get the backstory for the other numbers seemingly randomly interspersed throughout the film. Like the plot will be going along and suddenly you'll get a big number "2" or whatever on the screen and we'll take ten or fifteen minutes on another character's backstory and you really have to pay close attention to make sure whether we're in the backstory or in the present.

And this is almost a movie where I shouldn't care about spoilers, because there almost isn't anything to spoil in the movie, but I'm not going to bother with too many story details as it is, because it's really not important. It's a Michael Bay film, and the important thing in a Michael Bay film is the action and the explosions and all the collateral damage.

And there's plenty of that. The movie's front-ended with the first mission which goes on for almost half an hour, there's action in the backstories, and the third act is one big long action setpiece on a yacht.

Of course, it's all in Bay style of confusing shaky-cam "who is where and what's the opposition and how much opposition is there". One thing I noticed from the very first mission is that it's a car chase, and the heroes are being chased by the bad guys. So there's a black car tailing them throughout Florence and they do some action thing whatever to bust the car, and the car flips and there's an explosion. Yay. Then they turn a corner and there's another black car behind them, so they get rid of that. Then there's another black car behind them, or a motorcycle. And so on, and so on, and it really feels like the heroes aren't even making a dent in the opposition, or any kind of progress, really. Later on, there are scenes where bad dudes with guns just keep appearing in scenes despite there not being any indication of them existing. Bad guys just spawn in where Bay wants there to be a shootout. There's a scene on a roof where the sniper character has four guys he needs to take down, and he does so handily, but then a few minutes later more guys show up and it was like what's the point? It's like a video game where you shoot the goons, but more goons keep coming in forever until you push a button or pick up the objective or just leave.

And of course, 90% of the comedy attempts fall flat, and the remaining 10% is entirely Ryan Reynolds with his signature brand of sass. There's an action scene in the middle where #3 is just spouting off movie quotes. He goes through about eight before #1 just tells him to shut up... and then he gets in another two.

So, I looked up some other reviews, and some people are like "Well, what do you expect from Michael Bay? Positive review." and boy is he so entrenched in the film world that he can just keep making these incoherent expensive messes.

So, yes, I watched a bad movie all the way through, but sometimes it helps if you're trying to remember what a good movie is. Like I look on Jojo Rabbit and Knives Out even more favorably now that I've seen this. Even Rise of Skywalker, for the faults that it had, I just feel better enjoying it as a Star Wars fan because it was a competently made movie.

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I thought it was awesome.

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