6 Underground (2019)
Directed by Michael Bay
After faking his death, a tech billionaire recruits a team of international operatives for a bold and bloody mission to take down a brutal dictator.
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35 films that influenced 6 Underground
What critics say influenced 6 Underground
I imagine Michael Bay, sitting down on his least-stained beanbag chair, cracking open his second Monster energy drink and occasionally leering at his half-torn Farrah Fawcett poster, had a Mission: Impossible marathon one day and decided “I can do this, too.”
6 Underground is a whirlwind collision of the Ocean’s heist films, the Fast & Furious franchise, the Mission: Impossible series, Vin Diesel’s XXX saga, and The A-Team.
6 Underground comes across like a mashup between Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, and Fast Five.
With its makeshift family, high-speed car chases, and elaborate heists, Netflix’s action blockbuster “6 Underground” is solid proof that Michael Bay would love to direct a “ Mission: Impossible ” or “Fast and Furious” movie.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If the Mission: Impossible , Ocean’s Eleven and Fast and Furious franchises had a baby with naught but two cold nickels clinking around in its skull, it would be 6 Underground .
The movie is produced by David Ellison’s Skydance Media, which has also been involved in the most recent “Mission: Impossible” pictures, and it is hard not to feel like “6 Underground” is just some knockoff version of the “M:I” movies, without any of the gritty resolve or unexpected grace that filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has brought to that series’ most recent entries.
Anyway, that’s the closest the film gets to any pathos—when they bury Six at sea, Reynolds starts talking about Leave It to Beaver and makes lots of silly jokes, which kills the vibe quicker than Franco was impaled.
Despite a running “Leave It to Beaver” joke, they are not a family, One insists, but an elite group of “ghosts” — super-skilled, ultra-lethal experts in their respective fields who’ve faked their deaths in order to “haunt the living for what they’ve done.”
Bay's cinema famously relies on such elements, but they haven't really gelled since 1998's Armageddon , and action movies have moved on via John Wick specifically, making 6 Underground decidedly old-hat.
If this were a better movie you could easily see it being the start of a franchise, but the problems start early and pile up almost as quickly as the John Wick -esque body count.
Take a beat from John Wick – don’t overcomplicate things, focus on the action, resist the urge to blow up everything and you’ll be dandy.
He doesn’t have the choreography of a franchise like John Wick .
Watching this globe-hopping thriller, you get the feeling that Michael Bay saw John Wick and thought he should be making movies like that.
Like the Fast & Furious franchise and the Avengers movies and every other modern series, it’s a movie about family, as long as that family is constantly devising new reasons for things (and people) to blow up.
6 Underground is a whirlwind collision of the Ocean’s heist films, the Fast & Furious franchise, the Mission: Impossible series, Vin Diesel’s XXX saga, and The A-Team.
Before the Fast & Furious series cornered the market for ludicrous action sequences, Bay was the go-to guy for outrageous stunts – and he delivers again here.
Clearly wanting to show that there would be no Fast & Furious films, arguably the new heir to his throne, without the road Bay paved, 6 Underground announces its swagger from its lengthy opening car chase.
You've made some enjoyable ones over the years -- the first "Transformers," "Bad Boys" -- but "6 Underground," a non-stop stunt reel with a few, admittedly impressive displays of your usual visual verve -- is just "Fast & Furious" crossed with an old Whitesnake music video, but with fewer functioning brain cells.
The apparent goal was to make an action film for people who find "Fast & Furious" movies too heavily plotted, only to create what feels like a bad Michael Bay-directed parody of a Michael Bay movie.
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What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If the Mission: Impossible , Ocean’s Eleven and Fast and Furious franchises had a baby with naught but two cold nickels clinking around in its skull, it would be 6 Underground .
Martin Scorsese might be right when he says Marvel movies are “theme parks”, but Michael Bay’s films make Avengers: Endgame look like Battleship Potemkin .
So, 6 Underground essentially has the plot of Team America: World Police, in which the functions of the United States military, the CIA, and all other projections of American power abroad are instead performed by this small team.
Reynolds’ One is like a combination of his snarky Deadpool character and Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network .
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Yet it tracks better than the past four Transformers movies combined, and it’s all a means of allowing Bay to execute some of the more outrageous action set-pieces of his career, including but not limited to: a rescue mission atop a Hong Kong tower that nicely strips away the self-seriousness of a similar set-piece from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight; an assault on a megayacht that bends the rules of magnetism and physics; a flashback sequence that dares to make parkour interesting again; and the deployment of the booming THX fanfare as a weapon – a solid wink from Bay to all the theatre-owners who will never let 6 Underground into their multiplexes.
There is supposed to be dumb fun here: Writers Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick are basically pumping steroids into 2001’s Swordfish, ripping off a bigger check for destruction to the order of folks with skills, wealth or both who use anonymity to right wrongs.