6 Underground (2019)

Two things were very obvious as Megan and I watched this movie:
First: Michael Bay really misses the “Transformers” series.
Second: This was clearly produced with the intent of getting big-screen theatrical release.

“6 Underground” (2019) is a Netflix original, which unfortunately has come to mean it’s approximately the same quality as those ‘direct to VHS’ sequels from the last media generation.
While Netflix originals may lack important storytelling themes and concepts like their magnetic tape forefathers, at least ‘Flix doesn’t skimp on the production budget. If nothing else, every terrible movie they’ve put out has at least been visually pleasing.

“6 Underground” followed six members who were legally dead, giving them immunity from life: no taxes, leases, relationships, etc., allowing them to go out into the world to do  whatever bonkers vigilante mission that billionaire Batman-wannabe #1 (Ryan Reynolds) felt like funding that day.
Yes, they all did go by numbers. As #1 described it: ‘real’ names weren’t used so that if one of them died, they wouldn’t feel particularly emotionally attached, which is fitting as #6 (Dave Franco) died about 20 minutes into the movie and I didn’t feel it in any way.
During one particularly ‘emotional’ scene, everyone spouted their first names, but it was fleeting and unimportant I didn’t find myself caring enough to remember any of them.
#1 also made it clear that you wouldn’t operate in a city you’d been to, or around people you’d met, or form emotional/romantic relationships with anyone. A rule set that everyone completely disregarded as soon as possible.

The introductions for each of the characters were very odd. The movie opened with a too-long, overly implausible car chase through Florence, Italy, where Michael Bay showed off roughly half of the product placement he signed into this flick. Each of the characters got a freeze-frame shot of a close-up of their face, their number-name, and the tagline for their role in the team (doctor, driver, sniper, etc). About an hour later into the movie, each of them got a five-minute backstory bit where they showed what each persons’ life was before #1 found them and how he recruited them into his team.
It would have been quite fitting if this were, say, a TV show, or other running media with guaranteed continuity where those backstories could have been explored and elaborated on, especially as more characters got involved. But, as a stand-alone movie with (hopefully) no chance of a sequel, it just felt like bad justification for time padding for a movie that had no reason to be 128 minutes long.
As the narrator, #1 also made repeated, cryptic references to being an orphan and having no family, which I think was supposed to be his ‘actual’ backstory, instead of a reference to being ‘dead’ now; while those plot threads kept getting thrown out, nothing ever got tugged.
While the intro scene played as if they were a seasoned group with repeated success stories under their belts, this movie actually the origin story of the self-proclaimed ‘6 Underground.’

I would like to take a moment to comment on just how stupid of a name that is. They could have at least spelled it out as “Six Underground” or “The Underground Six” or something in that vein.
Neither “The Hateful Eight” (2015) nor either “The Magnificent Seven” (1960/2016) replaced the numbers in their titles with actual numerals.

Remember up above how I mentioned that #1 was a billionaire?
Apparently he invented Neodymium magnets and made his fortune selling “magnet technology,” which in this case means “magic things that do whatever you need for any given scene.”
Please ignore the fact that neodymium is an element and thus has effectively always existed, or that consumer-grade neodymium magnets have been around since 1984, which would have made #1 at least 55 years old for him to have “invented” them. While I’m not suggesting that mid-century men can’t accomplish Tony Stark-levels of shenanigans, nothing about his character portrayed that kind of age; it very much played him up to be an angry, lonely 30-something.
Also: a quick trip to Wikipedia says that General Motors discovered said magnets.
Furthermore: for the man who invented such an important piece of hardware, followed by Gates/Jobs/Musk-levels of commercial and financial success, to just disappear into the ether, despite aggressive global vigilantism, makes no sense.

You’ll notice that I’ve only mentioned two of the seven numbers in this film.
That’s because #2 (Melanie Laurent), #3 (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), #4 (Ben Hardy), and #5 (Adria Arjona), were all aggressively uninteresting and unimportant to the plot. They existed, they got a backstory flashback, and they all lived through the end credits, just being bodies so they didn’t have to CGI-clone Reynolds five times. Nothing about them was special, their specific “skills” were only ever shown once, and I probably wouldn’t really have cared if they died like #6 did.
At most I can attribute one clause to each of them, all of which are standard Michael Bay character tropes: #2: attractive woman who gets shown off; #3: gruff man who doesn’t like being told what to do; #4: snarky teenager; #5: attractive woman who gets shown off. Even the other characters weren’t particularly developed: #6 died early; #7 (Corey Hawkins) was a service member so that Bay could justify some entirely irrelevant military hardware porn, and #1 filled bland character tropes and was only saved by the fact that Ryan Reynolds signed up for the role.
I think Bay has a Scrabble grab bag of squares with character archetypes written on them, so that he can just reach in and grab a handful of when he wants to make a movie.

The movie took place around #1’s plan to dethrone Rovach Alimov (Lior Raz) – a derpy stand-in for Recep Erdogan – who was the dictator of Turgistan – painfully obvious stand-in for Turkey.
Seriously: the Turgistan flag was just the Turkish flag in green instead of red.
Somehow #1 decided that replacing Rovach with his brother Murat (Payman Maadi) would magically fix all of the humanitarian issues that Turgistan was facing, despite the fact that the CIA had hunted down Murat for something vague and unexplained, so it’s hard to believe that Murat would really be any better.
Considering the real-life nightmare that is Turkey and how they’re treating Kurdish refugees, this felt like a particularly pointed political attack from Bay.

For some unexplainable reason, Michael Bay is absolutely terrible at timeline continuity. One scene was a ‘four years ago’ flashback that explained why #1 had chosen a particular dictator to dethrone, though it showed #7 standing and talking to him, despite the fact that #7 was hired ‘now,’ after #6 died in Italy.
The finale of the movie took place on a super-yacht in an unspecified part of the Arabian Gulf at sunset. As the team of six fought their way through an inexplicable number of henchmen, the ambient lighting around them kept changing, switching from ‘early sunset’ behind #1 to ‘dead of night’ behind #7. At first I thought this might have something to do with which angle the camera was shooting from, but that line of reasoning crumbled pretty quickly as more of the fight scenes were shown.

Hong Kong was included as a set piece, along with a bunch of random things with Chinese writing on them, which was clearly how Sundance Studios got China to fund part of this mess. It seems like an odd inclusion considering the real-life political unrest happening there right now; I wonder if the movie was filmed sometime in 2018 but only released now due to some kind of studio release date conflict.
Also: at one point #1 cursed “American technology” when his phone spontaneously disintegrated in his hands, despite the fact that all modern phones are made in China, so that was particularly weird.

The soundtrack was nice enough. It had the same emotional swells and orchestral strength that the Transformers movies all had, but clearly wasn’t composed by Steve Jablonsky. Nor was there a running theme through the film.

Finally, the scenery and cinematics: beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous.
Behind Ryan Reynolds, this was the one other shining light of this film. Stunning wide, sweeping shots of cities and landscapes, colors that popped with contrast, crystal clear close-ups of cars, large explosions with sparks flying, expensive things doing expensive stuff, and lots and lots of product placement.
This was absolutely filmed to be on the silver screen and undoubtedly would have looked beautiful up there.

Unfortunately, this movie earned itself a 2 Claw rating, which means that, at most, you should watch this on a tiny screen on an airplane.
Ryan Reynolds was the only actor who made this movie any kind of tolerable. With his trademark snark and wit, he made the role of #1 the only one worth watching, but even that couldn’t save his character from stupid backstory and vague motivations.
Seriously. Reynolds saved this from getting a 1 Claw while the cinematics kept me from turning it off completely.
I probably wouldn’t have minded seeing this on a plane, but it was definitely a waste of two hours of movie time on the couch.