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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. It also makes it clear why that would be a bad idea.

You have to give Bay credit for making a movie that is distinctly his brand. Anyone familiar with the “Bad Boys” or “ Transformers ” franchises need only see about five minutes of this one to recognize it as a Bay joint. There are the requisite shots of beautiful women from a ground angle, jokes that even the writers would probably say are in bad taste, hyper-kinetic cuts to pop/rock tunes, and nary a thing that resembles human emotion or the actual physics of the real world. And, for a while, especially during an extended car chase through Florence in the film’s lengthy opening, the Bay-ness of it all is kind of engaging. The ridiculousness of the opening sequence has a critics-be-damned insanity to it that’s almost impressive. As Dave Franco ’s getaway driver speeds through the city, he nearly runs over a woman with a baby, a couple cute dogs, and even some nuns, who then proceed to flip him off. There’s a sense that Bay and writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (who co-wrote the " Deadpool " movies) are embracing the hyperactive action fan out there who's tired of Oscar fare like " Marriage Story " and " The Irishman ," and saying, “We know this is dumb fun, but let’s just put logic aside for a couple hours. Turn your brain off and just enjoy it.” Sadly, like the ragtag group at the center of the film learns, even the best plans can be hard to follow.

“6 Underground” is about an eclectic billionaire ( Ryan Reynolds )—it’s implied he invented the vibration you feel when you get a text or call—who has faked his own death to go underground and lead a team of similar mercenaries, people who are able to go off the grid to do the jobs that world governments refuse to do. In a film that’s clearly designed to be the start of a franchise, their job is nothing less than a military coup, deposing the vicious leader of the fictional country of Turgistan and replacing him with his more peaceful brother. To do so will mean murdering dozens of people in high-powered action scenes that are all vaguely reminiscent of things Bay has done in films like “ Bad Boys II ” and “Transformers” (he even gets a chance to use the robot sound in his climax). Just know that nothing is simple, everything will involve explosions, and the body count will crest three figures.

The team, known only by their numbers—Reynolds is #1—also includes a deadly CIA spook (the movie’s best performer by far in Melanie Laurent , who can bring depth even to something like this and I would totally watch in a spin-off series), a wisecracking hitman ( Manuel Garcia-Rulfo ), a sky-jumping kid who is introduced running down the outside of the Duomo ( Ben Hardy ), a former sniper battling PTSD ( Corey Hawkins ), and a woman with so little character that I couldn’t really tell you her specialty ( Adria Arjona ). The excellent Iranian actor Payman Maadi (“ A Separation ”) plays the brother who the team has to exfiltrate and place in power.

If you’re wondering how “6 Underground” handles Middle Eastern politics, it’s with all the grace of a runaway truck. The scenes in Turgistan, including an early one in which children are bombed in a chemical warfare attack and a late one that’s meant to reflect the Arab Spring, are poorly executed at best and offensively exploitative at worst. One almost longs for a giant robot to pull Bay and company away from issues that arguably shouldn’t be used for B-movie action fodder, or at least shouldn't be in a film that pushes the boundaries of cartoonish action choreography.

It’s one thing to see Reynolds nervous that his driver is going to hit an Italian dog; it’s another thing to see children bombed in a refugee camp. I don’t think the makers of “6 Underground” really see the difference. And the sense that this film is tonally disastrous continues to mount, especially as the initial jolt of stylized action becomes numbing instead of entertaining, and the film keeps flirting with real-world issues it doesn't understand.

Before we get up in arms about what's "allowed" to be in an action movie, whether or not the subject matter rubs you the wrong way doesn't really matter because the main purpose of a film like “6 Underground” is to entertain. No one is really arguing otherwise. (I just don't find reflections of the last decade in Syria entertaining.) Most important, the film simply comes apart under that basic definition of its purpose. It becomes repetitive, nonsensical, and just loud after everyone gets an origin story and we're left with nothing to do but go boom. At the end, one of the characters even seems to understand that this is how most viewers will feel after watching, saying that this team can still “do some shit … awfully loud.” “6 Underground” is definitely some awfully loud shit. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

6 Underground (2019)

Rated R for strong violence and language throughout, bloody images and some sexual content.

127 minutes

Ryan Reynolds as One

Mélanie Laurent as Two

Dave Franco

Adria Arjona

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Three

Corey Hawkins as Five

• Michael Bay
• Rhett Reese
• Paul Wernick

Cinematographer

• Bojan Bazelli
• Roger Barton
• Lorne Balfe

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6 Underground review – Michael Bay's high-octane caper is a blast

Ryan Reynolds leads a shadowy team of mercenaries on a mission to topple a super-bad tyrant in this loud, frenetic and goofy thriller

F or pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph. And, incidentally, anyone who has seen Bay’s Florida crime caper Pain & Gain (2013) will know that he is not as dumb as he’s made out to be by all of us in the critical-gatekeepers-of-good-taste community. Having said that, the great man has done his best recently to live down to his reputation with a couple of insufferable Transformers films and 13 Hours , a celebration of gym-built, bearded US special forces guys blasting the hell out of foreign people in the Middle East. But 6 Underground – although every bit as infatuated with weaponry and violence as ever – does at least have a teeny bit of a sense of humour.

Basically, this is Bay trying to master the Mission: Impossible franchise style, perhaps specifically the Ghost Protocol film . It is about a team of freelance mercenaries who have been declared dead and now ply their trade underground, in the shadows, as ghosts. They are led by a guy calling himself Number One (Ryan Reynolds) assisted by a super-sexy badass known simply as Number Two (Mélanie Laurent), and it is as well the obvious jokes never occur to anyone.

Number One would appear to be extremely wealthy because he is evidently bankrolling the whole thing, although this is never spelt out. He has a wisecracking team working for him, including bulky tough guy Number Three (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), free-running parkour daredevil Number Four (Ben Hardy), sleek operator Number Five (Adria Arjona), death-defying driver Number Six (Dave Franco) and ex-military hero Number Seven (Corey Hawkins). One of this crew gets offed, bringing the total number down to the titular six.

Bay kicks us off with a riotously over-the-top car chase scene in Florence that appears to pay homage to The Italian Job , featuring cars that appear to go through the Uffizi itself, and Number Four gives us some tasty parkour stunts atop the sacred Duomo. Are these being achieved digitally? They look very real.

This Italian romp is the first fusillade of nonsensical excitement in the six’s righteous mission – to topple super-bad-guy and chemical weapons enthusiast Alimov (Lior Raz), the hated tyrant of Turgistan, a Pakistan province that this film upgrades to the status of sovereign state. (“Turgistan” is invoked with the same deadly seriousness as the fictional and unstable “Kreplachistan” in the second Austin Powers movie.) They also plan to release his apparently nicer brother, Murat (Payman Maadi), from house arrest in Hong Kong with a view to installing him as the acceptable presidential alternative. (So much for democracy.)

And so it carries on, with an avalanche of luxury locations, deafening explosions, droll tagline gags and side-eye drolleries, and culminating in a bizarrely surreal scene aboard a huge yacht, in which Number One brings out his secret weapon – a hyper-strength magnet. It’s an entertainingly goofy and excessive folly from Bay.

6 Underground is released on 13 December.

• Action and adventure films
• Michael Bay
• Ryan Reynolds

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Michael Bay’s ‘6 Underground’: Film Review

A Michael Bay movie begs for the biggest screen possible, although the attention-deficit hyperactivity director's made-for-Netflix action bonanza makes clever adjustments to the format.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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If you’re planning to see “6 Underground” in theaters, be sure to get there on time. Within the first six minutes, Michael Bay destroys a plane, a motorcycle, three cars, countless pedestrians and the dignity of three Italian nuns. I’m fairly certain that Ryan Reynolds — who heads up the film’s off-the-grid vigilante squad, for whom this made-for-Netflix action bonanza is named — also kills a high-ranking Mafia lawyer, although the action comes so fast and so furious that it’s hard to say. In any case, moments later, Reynolds whips out the lawyer’s eyeball and uses it to access a retinal scanner, all while moving slightly faster than the speed of thought.

James Bond movies, which virtually invented the pre-title tease, have a reputation for starting out at top velocity, but this is something new. It’s minute-one mayhem (a strategy for which Michael Bay is unusually well suited), and it’s quite likely to become the new normal for Netflix originals — action movies at least — which need to rip your eyeballs out from the get-go or risk losing your attention altogether. As a critic, it’s my job to watch films from beginning to end, but if you were to check my Netflix queue right now, you’d discover five movies with less than a couple minutes viewed of each one. “Continue watching?” the app asks. Naaah.

When you go to a theater, you buy a ticket and chances are, you sit through to the end credits. But at home, what’s to stop you from bailing on a Michael Bay movie after the first dull stretch? So Michael Bay’s solution? Never a dull moment. Unapologetically R rated, “6 Underground” is probably the most action packed of his non-“Transformers” movies, which requires the attention-deficit hyperactivity director to cram most of his exposition in between explosions, starting with the crew’s maiden mission in Florence, Italy.

While racing through the European city’s narrow streets in a nitro yellow-green Alfa Romeo, the 6 Underground are identified one at a time. There’s Dave Franco, “the driver”; Reynolds, “the billionaire”; Mélanie Laurent, the (inexplicably French) “CIA spook”; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, “the hit man”; Adria Arjona, “the doctor” (who never touches a gun); and Ben Hardy, “the skywalker” (a clever name for a parkour cat burglar). These characters know each other only by number, Reynolds’ “One” informs us, to better protect them from forming attachments. 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.”

If they were superheroes, their power would be invisibility. But they’re not, and that poop-green coupe is proof that they’re not exactly trying to keep a low profile. The presumed-dead gimmick doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny, but that doesn’t so much matter when the movie doesn’t slow down long enough to let you pick apart such details. Frankly, sloppy as Bay’s whiplash editing style can be at times, the Florence sequence is a marvel of multitasking (Five removes a bullet from Two’s side while Six steers the car, pulling over long enough for Two to jump out and shoot up a fluorescent orange henchman’s vehicle) and narrative efficiency, so long as coherence isn’t a priority.

But here’s another aspect in which Bay may need to adjust his style for Netflix — which is positioning “6 Underground” as the service’s big December bandwidth-buster, à la “Bird Box” and “Bright”: The director packs the important information so densely into the movie’s first 10 minutes that audiences may be loath to look away even for a moment in the two hours still to come. That means no bathroom breaks, no email checking and no excessive blinking, lest you miss anything (unless your fellow viewers don’t mind your hitting pause).

Fortunately, it’s virtually impossible to sustain that level of intensity for an entire feature, and Bay and screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese allow for brief moments to catch one’s breath. In that opening scene, for instance, the Alfa Romeo speeds through Florence’s Accademia Gallery, pulling up just short of Michelangelo’s David to deliver a brief art history lesson. “Is the David the one with the really small…?” asks Six, sizing up the statue’s marble manhood — as if Bay’s entire oeuvre hasn’t been one great big case of overcompensation. Still, the moment says a lot about his priorities: Bay has no qualms about destroying a few irreplaceable artworks in service of what (per the press kit) car pro Joey Freitas describes as “creating our own visual art.”

Well, it’s certainly not great literature, but if you can get past the imbecilic script, there’s no question that Bay has seized the opportunity to make “6 Underground” as visually stunning as such a project can withstand. That still means ogling women, although when not obliged to vamp about in lingerie or skin-tight cocktail dresses, Laurent and Arjona come across as impressive action figures in their own right. Despite a lot of unnecessary flashbackage (or maybe not enough), it’s unclear what about these characters’ respective pasts (especially the women’s) would want to make them part of a billionaire-funded vigilante organization.

“6 Underground” belongs to the school of “if you keep things moving fast enough, nobody will stop to question the logic.” The movie explains how One earned his fortune (in something called “micro-magnets,” which pays off late in a set-piece involving a massive superconductor) but never reveals how he became such an efficient killer, or why he’d want to be. Rather, the movie views the world as “an endless, evil, shitty loop … wrapped in red tape,” and sees the 6 Underground as the apolitical answer to our prayers. Their mission is to take out a dictator named Rovach (Lior Raz), the top offender on One’s private list of the world’s 10 most wanted evildoers — leaving the others for potential sequels, if Netflix judges the film’s performance worthy of the investment.

Rovach oversees a Middle Eastern country that looks like a cross between Syria (with its refugees cowering in bombed-out cities) and the United Arab Emirates (which serves up such locations as the semispherical Aldar Headquarters Building and the etched-wall atrium of the Louvre Abu Dhabi). One’s scheme involves taking out Rovach’s four top generals in Vegas, liberating his democracy-minded brother (Iranian actor Payman Maadi of “A Separation”) from house arrest in Hong Kong, then staging a televised coup on his home turf.

After one of the gang dies early on, One recruits a jaded Delta Force sniper (Corey Hawkins) to bring the number back to an even six. That’s one of the film’s few quiet moments, and once Seven is on board, the dynamic between the not-friends, not-family, and not-remotely-Cleaver-like gang begins to improve. They still squabble, but at least now, they’re less likely to abandon one of their own if the mission goes awry. And the missions always go awry.

One thing’s for certain: Bay’s approach to action seems likely to drive a lot more viewing than the service’s awards titles. Just today, Netflix chief Ted Sarandos claimed that 26.4 million households (that’s one-fifth of all U.S. households) watched at least 70% of “The Irishman” in its first week. That’s a big fat lie — although I don’t have the data, only anecdotal evidence, to prove it. If impressive numbers matter to the company, then Bay’s their man: No one specializes in wall-to-wall action quite like Bay, who adopts Tony Scott-level abstraction in his editing here, relying far more on tight framing (for the smaller screens?) than usual, and even going so far as to incorporate nimble consumer-grade camera footage for the parkour scenes. The dizzying mix will make audiences grateful for Netflix’s 10-second rewind feature — and may even set repeat-viewing records.

Reviewed at TCL Chinese 6 Theatre, Hollywood, Dec. 10, 2019. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 128 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release, presented with Skydance, of a Skydance, Bay Films production. Producers: Ian Bryce, Michael Bay, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger. Executive producers: Matthew Cohan, Garret Grant, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese.
• Crew: Director: Michael Bay. Screenplay: Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese. Camera (color, widescreen): Bojan Bazelli. Editor: Roger Barton. Music: Lorne Balfe.
• With: Ryan Reynolds, Mélanie Laurent, Corey Hawkins , Adria Arjona, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ben Hardy, Lior Raz, Payman Maadi, Dave Franco.

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‘6 Underground’ Review: Action by the Numbers

Ryan Reynolds plays a billionaire who’s part Deadpool, part Elon Musk and all Michael Bay hero in this relentless action movie.

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By Glenn Kenny

If the B-movie director Andy Sidaris were alive today, he’d be pretty ticked off about “6 Underground,” now streaming on Netflix. In 1979, Sidaris, whose low-budget actioners were generously cast with Playboy Playmates who shot guns and shed their tops with diligent reliability, made “Seven,” in which a master assassin deployed a team of seven specialized killers to take out drug traffickers in Hawaii.

“6 Underground,” the budget of which could probably have funded at least 500 Sidarises, stars Ryan Reynolds as a self-ghosted billionaire in charge of a team of five other espionage specialists out to “do something” about “the evil in this world.”

Directed by Michael Bay with his customary fast-cutting, low-angle-semi-circling-camera, huge-destruction-of-real-and-simulated-property style, “6 Underground” isn’t a wholly blatant Sidaris rip. For instance, Bay flirts with female nudity, as usual, but never crosses the line. The R rating here is earned with blood and gouged eyeballs.

Reynold’s character is like Deadpool filtered through Elon Musk, if Elon Musk were cool, or “cool.” But his performance feels a little disinterested. Hardly matters. The movie opens with a high-speed car chase during which one of the team has bullet-extraction surgery in the back seat. And that’s almost 20 minutes right there.

Engineering a coup in a geopolitical hot spot so vaguely rendered it could be Middle Eastern or South Asian, the gang performs a “Penthouse Extraction” (sounds like what 1970s teen boys did with the magazines their dads hid in the garage). This involves compromising the integrity of an infinity pool with extreme prejudice and then, parkour, parkour, parkour.

When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There’s certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that’s why there’s “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

6 Underground

Rated R for blood, gouged eyeballs, and much more gore. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.

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‘6 Underground’: Movie Stars, Action, Guns, Booms, T&A, Michael Bay

By David Fear

In the old days, i.e. 2017, you had to go to your local multiplex to see a Michael Bay blockbuster. You know the type of movie we’re talking about: explosions, robots, shots which last 0.003 seconds, chiseled dudes, smokin’-hot babes. (Not “men” and “women.” There are no such things as men and women in a Michael Bay movie. Only chiseled dudes and smokin’-hot babes.) Because it is currently 2019, however, we — by which we mean cinephiles to cultural pundits to guys wearing backwards baseball caps to your mom — can log onto Netflix on a Friday and voila, there’s a brand new movie from the Transformers / Bad Boys director on the streaming service, ready to entertain you, or at the very least, help you kill brain cells and a little over two hours. You do not even need to leave your couch. What a time to be alive.

Somewhere in an abandoned, heavily set-dressed airfield in the California desert, there is a sextet of “ghosts” — people presumed dead and who have left their old lives behind — that operate as a self-contained, elite global security unit. They answer to no government. They have no Christian names, answering only to generic handles (the Hitman, the C.I.A. Spook, the Skywalker) and numbers (3, 6, 4, 2). Their leader is known simply as the Billionaire ( Ryan Reynolds ). These men and women fly around the world to picturesque metropolitan areas and political hotspots — though they always seem to remain in an over-lit limbo you could call the “Bay area” — and fix what No. 1 refers to as the worst of the worst.

And, after losing a member during a mission in Florence, Italy, the team recruits a former military sniper (Corey Hawkins) as their No. 7 (like an all-star player’s jersey, your number is retired if you’ve bought the farm), and sets their sights on the next target. He’s a dictator who rules over the fictional country of Turgistan, and has a habit of gassing his own people and Good Samaritans who set up makeshift hospitals. So the group, armed only with a ginormous arsenal and a bottomless budget and extreme-sports skills, come up with a plan to… to… um….

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[ Weary sigh ]

[ Leans forward]

[Beckons to reader ]

OK, so, listen: There’s really no point describing what happens, or how, or when, or why. This is not a narrative film. This is not “cinema,” or maybe it is, who the fuck knows anymore? This is a Michael Bay movie. It’s like someone is repeatedly poking you in the parts of your brain that register mere sensation, and keeps hammering away until a line of drool drops from your downturned lip. I get it. So do you. You’re not going to watch it. Or you are going watch it, and either decry the death of all Western civilization or pump your fists in the air. It’s another lingerie catalogue sprinkled with carnage. We both know the deal here.

So, in the spirit of 6 Underground, let’s just list off a random bunch of elements, all of which factor into the movie, in what may or may or not be the order in which they appear or are referenced; like the thing itself, how you consume the ingredients is of zero consequence. The only thing that matters is that there’s a lot it, and it’s very loud. This will either drive you away or have you fumbling for the remote ASAP. So:

Guns. Ferraris. Tits. Ass. Boom. Bang. Pow. The Uffizi Gallery. Flags. Parkour. Headshots. Mélanie Laurent. Las Vegas. Luxury yachts. Dave Franco. Squealing guitars. Red Bull. Lavazza. Captain Morgan Rum. THX. More explosions. Grenades. Magnets. 8 Mile. The Middle East….

…Stubble. Doggy-style intercourse. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. Skyscrapers. Swimming pools. Exit wounds. Rock climbing. Parisian bartenders. Thong underwear. Richard III. Laughing gas. Car crashes. High-priced escorts. Assassinations. Björn Borg. Portishead. Toddlers. Dubstep. That “whoa-whoa-whooooaaaa-whoooooooooaaaaaaaa-oooooooaaaaaa” part in popular jock-jam anthems….

… Deadpool (voiceover). Planes. Revolution. Penthouse suites. Ziplines. Welshly Arms. Skintight dresses. Neon green. Biceps. Broken glass. Bombs. Molars. Snark. Scottish accents. Incoherence. Xenophobia. Sexism. Auteurism (Vulgar). ‘Merica.

Good luck. Godspeed.

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Netflix's 6 Underground Review

The bay-team..

6 Underground Gallery

6 Underground, with its unabashed use of indie-rock anthems that would be used in GoArmy ads and/or WWE pay-per-views and its sad lack of Peter Stormare, is skin-of-its-teeth saved by Ryan Reynolds, who's able to make the scenes between the set pieces exponentially more palatable, all while fully knowing this is the type of film Deadpool would make fun of.

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‘6 Underground’ Review: Michael Bay’s Costly Action Outing Could Be Netflix’s Next Mega-Franchise

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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Michael Bay knows his way around a multimillion-dollar budget. This is, after all, the man who gifted the world a $150 million movie about aliens that turn into cars, and that was just the start — but the “Transformers” and “Bad Boys” director’s latest comes with a different kind of price tag. For his first Netflix -financed feature, Bay is again in $150 million territory, enough to earmark his “ 6 Underground ” as the streaming giant’s second-most expensive original ever. The first is still “Bright,” a critical laughingstock that overcame biting reviews to become a massive hit for its ambitious owner.

Those are big shoes to fill, but Bay and his wildly charismatic cast (led by Ryan Reynolds, and that’s only the beginning of the crew’s charm) are more than up to the task in an impossibly cool, often incomprehensible vigilante thriller that seems destined to launch a massive new franchise for Netflix.

If you like Bayhem, you’re going to love “6 Underground,” which opens with a nearly 15-minute-long car chase that pokes fun at spy flicks, the Spice Girls, and even Michelangelo’s statue of David while also unfurling non-stop action and enough civilian bloodshed to explain why no traditional studio would reasonably make it. Cut fast, short, and with a frenzy befitting the use of illegal drugs — much like a particularly good Bud Light commercial — the film is rife with narrative questions and plot holes the size of the small Middle Eastern country (aka Turgistan, what a world) Reynolds and his misfit mob are trying to liberate.

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Perhaps it’s Bay who’s most liberated here, armed with a zippy script from “Deadpool” scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and a cast that seems more than happy to ping-pong between nutso action and goofy gags. It’s pure Bay, through and through. Not all of the filmmaker’s obsessions are worth keeping, particularly when it comes to his beloved faux-arty dutch angles and low-angle shots that mostly function as upskirt opportunities for the many beautiful women who trounce through the film at random. At least “6 Underground” attempts to mitigate some of Bay’s baser tendencies with something approaching an ethical agenda.

After hacking through a half-hour of blood-spattered action mayhem and a ludicrous timeline conceit that is thankfully soon abandoned, Bay and company get to the meat of it: Reynolds is One, a nameless orphan billionaire who made his money with magnets (this will, of course, become important later) and has now launched his own vigilante squad.

Even with all his money, One is aware of the limits of power, and has designed his own way to take out the “truly world-class evil motherfuckers” without involving world leaders or secret agencies or even something as boring as laws. He’s assembled a team of similarly-minded badasses — a divine Melanie Laurent as a “CIA spook,” the appealing Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a hit man, “Bohemian Rhapsody” star Ben Hardy as a parkour enthusiast, and more — requiring nothing less than their absolute secrecy and for them to leave their old lives behind. (Cue a ludicrous amount of voiceover narration from Reynolds about being a figurative ghost.)

While Reese and Wernick attempt to spend a bit of time with each member of the team, including newbie Seven (Corey Hawkins), it’s yet another narrative element dropped early, all the better to make room for more inspired action sequences. (At least Seven gets to witness his own funeral, in one of the film’s funniest sequences.) It’s also a smart move for One, who refuses to let his crew bond as a “family,” a twisted idea for a group he’s isolated in hopes of making the rest of the world a better place.

Their current mission involves deposing an evil leader (a perfectly cast Lior Raz) and swapping in his more fair-minded brother (“A Separation” star Payman Maadi; who knew that Bay was an Asghar Farhadi acolyte?), a scheme that will engender the use of an unholy amount of explosives, a ridiculous amount of bullets, and one stunt that instantly ranks as one of Bay’s best. (Hint: keep an eye on that massive roof pool.)

Bay clearly didn’t leave one red Netflix cent on the table and, despite a handful of creaky-looking sequences apparently pulled off someone’s GoPro, the film’s unrelenting action is as ambitious and insane as anything he’s ever made. It’s also the sort of ostensibly original material — cribbed from better spy films and far worse vigilante joints, made fresh with a winning cast — that could inspire a bonafide blockbuster franchise for Netflix. The explosions might not be as big on the streaming screen, but they’re as bonkers as ever.

Netflix will release “6 Underground” in select theaters on Wednesday, December 11, with a streaming release following on Friday, December 13.

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‘6 underground’: film review.

Ryan Reynolds leads a crew of global vigilantes in Michael Bay's Netflix adventure '6 Underground.'

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Indignant about his government’s unwillingness to bring the world’s despots to justice, a cocky billionaire recruits a diverse team of specialists and starts hunting warlords in off-the-grid, accountable-to-nobody fashion. You might think that director Michael Bay is angling to make his star, Ryan Reynolds , the Tom Cruise of a dumber, car-crashier version of the Mission: Impossible films. But what his new 6 Underground actually feels like is the over-serious pilot episode of a gimmick-driven, globetrotting ensemble adventure hoping to pass for glamorous on network TV circa 1987. Trouble is, those shows — hacky and predictable as they were — hit their origin-story beats much more satisfyingly than this bloated, dull action flick.

At least fans who still give Bay extravaganzas a chance don’t have to leave home to do it: After hitting select theaters Dec. 11, it joins the dross on Netflix a mere two days later.

Release date: Dec 11, 2019

“I know what happens when you die,” Reynolds announces in voiceover in the opening scene. “If you’re lucky enough that the world believes you’ve died when you haven’t, and if you have a few billion dollars sitting around, you can spend the rest of your years righting the world’s wrongs without worrying about mortal entanglements like marriages and mortgages. Well, maybe. But isn’t your old accountant going to start wondering how a dead man keeps siphoning millions out of his bank accounts?”

Screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese — whose personal balance sheets include a G.I. Joe dud or Alien ripoff for every Deadpool or Zombieland — don’t care a bit about how this character makes being deceased work for him, and never imagine a single instance in which it helps our man (or those he convinces to follow his lead) get something done. Instead, they just keep asserting the value of this disentanglement from the world, over and over, as if they believe they invented the idea and want to ensure they get the credit. No joke: Sixty-five minutes into the film, we’re still hearing solemn pronouncements like, “the world was wrapped in red tape…so we left it all behind, to become no one….”

Being dead doesn’t keep you from getting a driver’s license, evidently. After its “I’m dead, and it rocks!” prologue, the movie kicks off with a 15- or 20-minute car chase through the narrow streets of ancient Florence, a numbingly stylish sequence full of extreme close-ups and lens flare. Innumerable cars fly through the air, bodies are hurled onto pavement, a chopped-out eyeball rolls around in the floorboard, and all the while, a doctor in the back seat of the protagonists’ car is trying to pull a bullet out of the gut of a former “CIA spook” played by Melanie Laurent .

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At a couple of points, this sequence seems to want to make us laugh: See driver Dave Franco execute a frantic turn to dodge not only a mother carrying a baby, but fluttering doves and a slobbering puppy as well. But (intentional) laughs have never been one of Bay’s strong suits, and the slo-mo gag is barely a speed bump on the way to more exploding car crashes. At one point, while fleeing several cars that are shooting at our heroes, Franco decides he has to find the Uffizi and literally drive through the famous museum. (Why? Because Netflix has money to burn, and they’ve already spent what they’ve set aside for trying to convince you they support auteurist cinema.)

These characters are known by numbers, not names, evidently because even the dead need to avoid emotional entanglements. The Billionaire is No. 1, of course, which is a phrase that will never be uttered in the 2020 Democratic primary. The other numbers include the Spy and the Driver and the Doctor (Adria Arjona), a Hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and a Thief (Ben Hardy) who enjoys parkour-ing around the tops of buildings.

In several cases, you can pretty much forget what the character’s alleged specialty is once the opening sequence is done, since it’ll be irrelevant for the rest of the film — and only in one case will that be because the character has died. When one of the six teammates’ honest-to-goodness kicks the bucket, the Billionaire goes shopping for a No. 7: Corey Hawkins, identified in press notes as “The Operator” when he should really be called “The One Who Retains a Healthy Skepticism About All This Baloney.”

The ungainliness of the storytelling is hard to describe adequately here — and one suspects it can’t all be blamed on the screenwriters — but in between interminable flashbacks, we learn that the Billionaire intends to pull off a coup in a fictitious country, removing an evil dictator and bringing his democracy-loving brother to power. That entails tracking the dictator’s top generals to an arms deal in Las Vegas, where Bay reassures any viewer who’s worried that the male gaze was killed by recent cultural upheaval: In between the ass-level shots of prostitutes in tight dresses, he stretches Laurent across a bed in lingerie and makes sure she holds the pose for a while.

Then we’re off to a Hong Kong luxury penthouse, where the film gets as close as it’ll come to heist-movie enjoyability, but sets its action up in ways that call to mind the much more fun (and much more ridiculous) Dwayne Johnson vehicle Skyscraper . Our heroes get the dictator’s brother out of his gilded prison, then hop over to the ‘Stans, where the Billionaire makes triggering an Arab Spring-style revolt look easy peasy — but not before reminding his collaborators that, since they’re all dead, I tell you , “none of us will be remembered” for what they accomplish on this magnificent day.

We can only hope that statement is true. Those who doubt it will note that, early on, 6 Underground told us that the Billionaire had chosen nine villains who were evil enough to merit his attention. This dictator was only the first on that list. Let’s hope the money — either the Billionaire’s or Netflix’s — runs out before this crew makes its way back to the screen.

Production companies: Skydance, Bay Films Distributor: Netflix Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melanie Laurent, Corey Hawkins, Adria Arjona, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ben Hardy, Lior Raz, Payman Maadi, Dave Franco Director: Michael Bay Screenwriters: Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese Producers: Ian Bryce, Michael Bay, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger Executive producers: Matthew Cohan, Garrett Grant, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese Director of photography: Bojan Bazelli Production designer: Jeffrey Beecroft Costume designer: Jany Temime Editor: Roger Barton Composer: Lorne Balfe Casting director: Denise Chamian

Rated-R, 128 minutes

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Review: Action spectacle of ‘6 Underground’ brings together Michael Bay and Ryan Reynolds

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Are you suffering from prestige fatigue? Have you seen too many recent movies that asked of viewers to think, to feel, to engage with characters as if they were actual human beings? The volume business dealers at Netflix have a possible solution for that. Alongside “The Irishman,” “Marriage Story” and its more upmarket year-end titles, let the service now also offer you “6 Underground,” a new film directed by Michael Bay.

The notion of Bay being given more or less a blank check to create one of his kinetic, overwhelming, things-go-boom action movies is both thrilling and disconcerting. Bay is a dazzling technician, with a commendably strong commitment to capturing as much in-camera live action as possible, but he has long stubbornly refused to progress as a storyteller or anything other than a purveyor of over-the-top action imagery. The oddball detour of his 2013 satire “Pain & Gain” looks more and more an outlier in his filmography, even as he seems to have concluded his run with the outsized “Transformers” franchise.

After a brief opening sequence helps establish the story — Ryan Reynolds as an enigmatic tech billionaire who has assembled a small private mercenary force to go after assorted international bad guys — the film plunges into an extended chase around Florence, Italy. While there is some wild stuff to be sure, cars careening around historic monuments, parkour on the top of the Duomo dome and lots of run-over newspaper racks, vegetable stands and assorted bystanders, Bay’s frenetic style of cutting and shooting often renders the images incomprehensible as objects in space. When everything is unreal, what is practical or what is digital becomes beside the point.

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. Bay’s brand of shock-and-awe filmmaking, which once seemed to be the cutting edge of action cinema, now feels a little out of step, outdated even, like someone who found their personal look long ago and steadfastly sticks to it even as the styles of the time evolve.

The script was written by the “Deadpool” team of Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, meaning it is tailor-made for Reynolds’ signature charming/smarmy routine. The actor’s ironic stance is a good fit for the universe of Michael Bay , where everyone outside the main characters has always been little more than comic foils to be shot, maimed, injured or cracked-wise about.

The rest of the team, an international ensemble that includes Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ben Hardy, Adria Arjona, Dave Franco and Corey Hawkins, never progress far beyond the data points of their respective character introductions as “the hitman,” “the driver,” “the doctor,” etc. Both Laurent and Hawkins in particular make the most of what they are given and often seem to be bumping up against the boundaries of what they are able to do. Actor Payman Maadi, known from the Oscar-winning Iranian film “A Separation,” also appears as the democracy-supporting brother of the brutal dictator of a fictional Middle Eastern country that Reynolds’ team intends to depose via a coup d’état. (As one does.)

Relatively early in the film, Reynolds’ character makes mention of multiple targets and possible missions, meaning there could easily be a series of “6 Underground” sequels waiting in the wings. Much like “6 Underground” itself, any other movies would not be entirely unwelcome but not exactly essential either. If Netflix is known for tracking the data of how far into a movie viewers get before turning it off, “6 Underground” is ideal content for their algorithms. After a strong start the movie steadily declines, one set piece after another, and there are many moments where the mind wanders and then asks: “Is this still going on?”

'6 Underground'

Rated: R, for strong violence and language throughout, bloody imagery and some sexual content Running time: 2 hours and 7 minutes Playing: Regency Village, Westwood; iPic Theaters at One Colorado, Pasadena; available Dec. 13 on Netflix

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‘6 Underground’ Is ‘Team America’ with People and without Satire | Review

Michael Bay shows he’s a dusty relic by trying to create a hit film for teenage boys in 2005.

At first blush, it may seem odd that Michael Bay , a director who has multiple $1 billion-grossing movies to his credit, would be cranking out a Netflix film, especially when it would appear that studios would still have an appetite for his brand of action filmmaking. But watching his latest effort, 6 Underground , you can see how much the world has left Bay behind. While other action movies are pushing the envelope, Bay is still churning out his combination of explosions, incomprehensible editing, and violence. Paired with a retrograde, neo-conservative script from Deadpool writers Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick that seems like it’s been sitting on the shelf since 2005, 6 Underground is perfect for Netflix not because you can queue it up anytime, but because it can play in the background without demanding your attention.

“One” ( Ryan Reynolds ) is a billionaire who saw an atrocity one day and decided to use his riches to fund an off the books, accountable-to-no-one death squad (sorry, special ops team) to take out bad guys. The hook is that everyone on the team, himself included, has faked their deaths so they have the freedom to move off the grid and take out bad guys like dictator Rovach Alimov ( Lior Raz ). One’s team is compromised of a CIA agent ( Melanie Laurent ), a hitman ( Manuel Garcia-Rulfo ), a guy who’s good at parkour ( Ben Hardy ), a doctor ( Adria Arjona ), and a sniper ( Corey Hawkins ). Their plan is to take out Rovach, stage a coup in his fictional country of Turgistan, and install Rovach’s non-murderous brother Murat ( Payman Maadi ). This involves destroying multiple cities and endangering countless lives along the way.

I don’t know if Michael Bay ever saw 2004’s brilliant Team America: World Police . It’s a direct parody of his work, right down to the song “Pearl Harbor” which includes lyrics like “Why does Michael Bay get to keep making movies?” If Bay did see Team America , he may have avoided making a serious version of it with 6 Underground . Instead, 6 Underground seems like Bay’s cynical way of getting in on the superhero franchise game while still promoting the neo-conservative viewpoint that freedom can be delivered down the barrel of a gun, and everyone needs to just get out of the good guys’ way. It was a silly viewpoint back in 2004 (hence Team America ) and it’s rendered even sillier now when you see that disposing of dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi hasn’t magically fixed Iraq and Libya, respectively. That’s not to say that dictators are good, but rather that nation-building is hard and there are thousands of dead people who are a testament to that.

The problem with positioning 6 Underground as its own kind of superhero movie is that setting and frameworks matter. Marvel movies are also a good-guys-vs-bad-guys conflict, but the audience gets some distance when your movies involve magic stones and a talking raccoon. Even Bay’s own Bad Boys and Bad Boys II have this distance in the cops-and-criminals framework where drug kingpins are bad, and it takes two Miami cops to save the day. But in the realm of geopolitics where the way to fix entire countries is just a matter of killing a dictator, the worldview seems childish, callous, and painfully obtuse when you look at a post-9/11 world. I’m sure if you asked Bay, he would say he’s apolitical, but the viewpoint being pushed by a movie like 6 Underground is that the best kind of soldier is the one who’s only accountable to his own conscience and that any problem can be solved with violence. Captain America can get away with this because he’s 90-year-old World War II veteran who fights space aliens. It’s harder to swallow in a film where the bad guy uses chemical weapons on children.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Michael Bay as a director is that he only has one level. You can see this problem in movies like The Island , Pain & Gain , and 13 Hours where Bay tries to venture outside his typical blockbuster comfort zone only to render any story back into a blockbuster. Michael Bay is wedded to his style of explosions, slo-mo, constantly panning cameras, speed, and noise. He’s not a storyteller as much as he’s a formula, and everything that goes through that formula can come out looking horribly deformed on the other side. It’s fine if your movie is nothing more than robots punching each other (although even here Bay wore out his welcome and was immediately shown up by the spinoff Bumblebee ), but 6 Underground knows there are bad things in the world. Put it through the Michael Bay formula, and a chemical weapons attack on innocent people has the same action framing as any other series of explosions but the music is slightly sadder. It’s super gross.

What’s most striking is that Bay, for all his technical proficiency in staging action shots, made a film that looks like it belongs back in 2005. The realm of action movies has moved far beyond anything Bay is doing here. He doesn’t have the stuntwork of a franchise like Mission: Impossible . He doesn’t have the choreography of a franchise like John Wick . He’s an MTV music video director in a world where MTV no longer has any cultural cache, but he’s still playing the same songs while action blockbusters have passed him by. The cynicism of “I’ll give you a team movie of badasses doing bad ass things like violently murdering guys and then having sex” (this is not hyperbole; this happens) only serves to speak to an audience that isn’t there anymore. That makes 6 Underground perfect for Netflix, which just wants to say it made a blockbuster and doesn’t have to worry about how many people tune in.

For some, the Netflix aspect gives 6 Underground a lower bar of entry and maybe something to pop on in the background like a hyper-violent screensaver where Ryan Reynolds fires off a series of quips. But even if you were to take the time to sit down and watch it, there’s no escaping how incompetently made the whole affair is. The editing is abysmal, the storytelling is frustratingly jumbled (perhaps because, like Reese and Wernick’s Deadpool , the plot of “get the bad guy” is so thin the only way to flesh it out is to go back in time and do prolonged origin story stuff), and the set pieces are exhausting with violence bordering on the sadistic.

It’s not so much that 6 Underground is a parody of Bay as much as everything about this movie is horribly played out. The film belongs in the mid-2000s rather than 2019 from its politics to its set pieces (the fact that there’s a parkour guy when that fad peaked in 2006 should tell you something). The film is a bunch of uninteresting set pieces tied together with a thin story and sophomoric humor padded with some macho posturing and jingoism. And yeah, that’s a Michael Bay movie, but it’s never felt more tedious and unnecessary than it does with 6 Underground .

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6 underground, common sense media reviewers.

Explosive action, bloody images in intense adventure.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Good defeats evil.

Flawed, mysterious characters are courageous, dete

Relentless, extended action sequences. Bloody deat

Sexual activity: passionate kissing, undressing, t

Frequent profanity, including "s--t," "p---y," "pr

References to or images of: Vespa, Red Bull, Capta

Social drinking.

Parents need to know that 6 Underground is an adventure film that introduces six characters who've gone off the grid (presumed dead) as they unite and take on an evil dictator from a Middle Eastern country. That's the story, but that's not what the movie is about. It's about action, a "stunt reel" from start…

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

Flawed, mysterious characters are courageous, determined, resourceful, loyal, and don't hesitate to use violence to defend themselves or to achieve their goals. Female characters are as powerful (and violent) as their male counterparts. Ethnic diversity.

Violence & Scariness

Relentless, extended action sequences. Bloody deaths from all manner of weaponry. Innocents are killed as well as combatants. Explosions, gunfire (machine guns, pistols, etc.), devastating vehicle crashes, fire, falls from buildings and structures, hand-to-hand fighting, wartime violence. Intense sequences with bloody wounds (including a dripping eyeball), point-blank shooting.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sexual activity: passionate kissing, undressing, thong, foreplay. Brief scenes of emotionless sexual intercourse. Reference to masturbation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent profanity, including "s--t," "p---y," "pr--k," and multiple forms of "f--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

References to or images of: Vespa, Red Bull, Captain Morgan, Heineken, Nikon.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that 6 Underground is an adventure film that introduces six characters who've gone off the grid (presumed dead) as they unite and take on an evil dictator from a Middle Eastern country. That's the story, but that's not what the movie is about. It's about action, a "stunt reel" from start to finish, including one very long car chase that almost destroys a city's downtown hub, including its pedestrians, buildings, and its entire infrastructure. And that's before we know who anyone is. Viewers can expect countless deaths of participants and innocent bystanders. Characters are shot (by machine guns and conventional weapons), run over, plummet to the ground, killed in vehicle accidents. Blood is everywhere -- it spurts, it pours, it emerges from heads, mouths, and wounds; a dripping eyeball takes center stage for a lengthy sequence. Language is coarse, with "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," "pr--k," and a reference to masturbation. Sexual activity occurs in several scenes (one sequence between caring strangers, others are fast and crude). There's some social drinking (wine, beer, rum); no drunkenness. Not for kids or the squeamish. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (17)
• Kids say (27)

Based on 17 parent reviews

What's the Story?

One ( Ryan Reynolds ), mysteriously described as "The Billionaire," amasses a team of experts and skilled daredevils to stop a ruthless dictator in 6 UNDERGROUND. Known only by their numbers -- Two ( Melanie Laurent) is a CIA agent; Three ( Manuel Garcia-Rulfo ), the hitman; Four (Adria Arjona), the doctor; Five (Ben Hardy), the skywalker, an intrepid parkour master; Six ( Dave Franco ), the driver; and finally Seven ( Corey Hawkins ), the soldier. The one thing they have in common -- they're all ghosts. Each is presumed dead. Their overall mission? To rid the world of evil-doers, specifically in this film a Middle Eastern tyrant whose good-guy brother is standing by to take his place.

Is It Any Good?

Michael Bay creates a new brand with rhythm to it: crash, boom, bullet through head, followed by a one-liner, a profundity, then walks off into the sunset ready for Sequels 1-5. Action fans will love it. There's plenty of "how did they do that?" and it's deserved, though sometimes hard to follow because the human editing hasn't quite caught up with the tech. All the performances are fine; the actors have very little to play and there's no need for subtlety. As the leader, Ryan Reynolds may be this generation's Bruce Willis , only nicer, without the snark, and with deep thoughts about how freeing death can be. But if viewers are looking for a story with any nuance at all, or inventive characters and relationships, leave 6 Underground to those who are happy to watch buildings shatter and "skywalkers" who defy man's limitations.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in 6 Underground . How much is too much? Was it exciting? Funny? Offensive? Why is it important to be aware of the impact of media violence on kids?

How do filmmakers and writers decide upon a villain? In the '40s, villains were Nazis; in the '50s-'80s they were Russian; present day, most are Middle Eastern. Movies then reinforce our attitudes and feelings about certain groups. Is this a positive or negative thing? Why?

Though the ending resolved the movie's story, how did the filmmakers indicate that we may see/hear more from the 6 Underground characters? What do you think will determine whether or not there's a sequel or sequels in the future?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : December 13, 2019
• Cast : Ryan Reynolds , Melanie Laurent , Manuel García Rulfo
• Director : Michael Bay
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Cars and Trucks , Adventures , Friendship
• Run time : 127 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong violence and language throughout, bloody images and some sexual content
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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6 Underground Reviews

At the end of the day, it is doing too much. The political commentary feels incredibly shallow and the plot is so barely there making it hard to follow and the heist confusing...I really, really wanted to like 6 Underground but I just can’t.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 21, 2023

The structure is poorly assembled and every character is given very little emotional depth.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | Jun 4, 2022

There's a method to Bay's madness, and you'll find it crammed somewhere in-between his cuts by the millisecond and swooping low-angle camera movements.

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/4 | Feb 22, 2022

Did Michael Bay invent World Cinema or did the world just copy him? The spectacle is savage, the metacommentary delightful, and the pace bloodthirsty though it runs long.

Full Review | Original Score: 80/100 | Jan 14, 2022

I am not sure who this is for, but anyone who has the stamina to make it all the way through the end of it deserves to be eligible for financial compensation.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2021

Bay's clumsy but visually impressive movie should partly sate anyone waiting for the superior thrills and spills of the next Fast & Furious outing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 11, 2021

The choreography and orchestration is brilliant when you take a step back, and an exhausting adrenaline rush as you take it in.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 2, 2021

If you want mindless action, 6 Underground delivers the goods. Don't expect the film to be intellectually stimulating or dramatically satisfying. If you are, you have never seen a Michael Bay movie before.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2020

Bar a couple of ridiculous sequences that stand out for their colourful design and audaciousness, the film is simply too aimless to find much of a reason to care beyond the over-stylised film-making.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 28, 2020

6 Underground is the kind of film that considers a nun giving the middle finger to be the height of edgy humour.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 17, 2020

In the moments that connect the action, 6 Underground becomes one of the worst, most cringeworthy movies of the last few years.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2020

A scattered grab bag of images and noises.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 30, 2020

6 Underground is Mountain Dew in cinema form, bursting with energy and ridiculous ideas that is occasionally entertaining but mostly just exhausting.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 17, 2020

It's not clever. It's not classy. He thinks it is. But it's bold and tough, and you will respect the awesome might of military technology, else be visited in the night by wicked-rad army ninjas in stealth Blackhawks...

Full Review | Original Score: D- | Jan 8, 2020

This is a terrible action movie that utilizes Michael Bay's worst instincts and none of his best.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 3, 2020

This is indeed a Michael Bay movie, and it has no shame about that. It's utterly insane-and an absolute blast.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2020

This is about as optional as it gets...it's not taking up big screens for "real cinema," but it's just there for people who know they enjoy this type of thing. It's very transparent.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2019

I'm not a Michael Bay fan, but despite myself, I was really enjoying this. A guilty pleasure.

Netflix's sorry attempt at building an action franchise goes very awry with a project that has absolutely no redeeming qualities.

It's so over-the-top that it's oddly dull.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 30, 2019

Screen Rant

6 underground review: michael bay's netflix movie fizzles out quickly.

6 Underground's intriguing setup and awe-inducing stunts are gradually overwhelmed by the commotion of Bay's direction, the further along it goes.

Over the course of twenty-five(ish) years of filmmaking, Michael Bay has established a style so distinctive, it even has its own name: "Bayhem". It's the scripts he draws from, however, that set Bay's work apart and distinguish his enjoyably ridiculous movies from the merely ridiculous ones. For that reason, people have been hopeful about this week's 6 Underground , a Netflix exclusive that pairs Bay with Zombieland and Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Unfortunately, that combination is better on paper than in action. 6 Underground 's intriguing setup and awe-inducing stunts are gradually overwhelmed by the commotion of Bay's direction, the further along it goes.

Deadpool himself, Ryan Reynolds, stars in 6 Underground as "One", a mysterious tech-genius billionaire who fakes his death in order to assemble a crack-team of vigilantes - all of whom, likewise, fake their deaths - and take down the worst criminals in the world. With a squad that includes a former CIA spook (Mélanie Laurent), a hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a parkour expert or "Skywalker" (Ben Hardy), a doctor (Adria Arjona), and an ex-sniper (Corey Hawkins) at his disposal, "One" sets his sights on Rovach Alimov (Lior Raz), a cruel dictator who rules the country Turgistan with an iron fist, and plots to replace him with his democracy-loving brother, Murat (Payman Maadi). But as it turns out, saving the world is pretty dang difficult, even when you're already "dead".

Related:  Ryan Reynolds, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo & Adria Arjona Interview: 6 Underground

6 Underground actually starts with a bang in the form of an extended car chase through Italy that effectively sets the tone for the film, bringing Bay back to the style of his pre- Transformers movies. It's particularly reminiscent of Bad Boys II in the way this sequence combines quippy dialogue with well-executed explosions, comical violence, and stylistic flourishes (specifically, slow-motion), all while causing cringe-worthy amounts of collateral damage to the lovely city surroundings. But as impressively staged as it and even set pieces to come are, Bay's trademark frantic editing (which is credited to three different people) robs it of its impact, rendering the spectacle into an increasingly chaotic mess. Obviously, everyone knows to expect hectic action scenes from Bay action films, but 6 Underground is noticeably rougher around the edges in its construction than his best offerings to date. It's a shame too, considering some of the amazing practical stunt-work at play.

Not helping matters, 6 Underground hops back and forth in time for a healthy chunk of its first half, rapidly filling in characters' backstories and moving the story forward along the way. It's quite similar to Reese and Wernick's approach on the original Deadpool (which had an equally flashback-heavy first act), yet the results here are much less coherent and muddle its narrative more than anything else. Things only get messier in the film's second half, as its focus shifts to "One" and his crew's attempt to overthrow Rovach by leading a coup in his (fictional) country. No surprise, this attempt to address Middle-Eastern politics through the lens of a Michael Bay action-thriller comes across as exploitative at worst and just confusing at best, offering little in the way of catharsis and promoting an almost fascistic ideology (where all the world needs to be saved is a rich guy who can do whatever he wants) in the process. Yes, of course, no one expects Bay's movies to be thoughtful about their messaging, but 6 Underground 's outlook is bafflingly backwards, even by his standards.

Buried beneath its excesses, 6 Underground has a clever heist-like storyline that resembles (and, in the third act, blatantly rips off) Inception , in the way it follows a group of highly-skilled individuals who trot around the globe and use advanced tech to not only pull off their jobs, but also cover their tracks. The film's charismatic cast is similarly well-matched to their respective roles, and the scenes where they're verbally playing off one another bring to mind the breezy pleasures of other team-up adventure like Ocean's Eleven (a movie that's even referenced in all but name at one point). Sorry to say, though, even an ensemble as talented as  6 Underground 's are unable to elevate the film's uneven combination of vulgar humor and heavy sentimentality (not to mention, Bay's leering camerawork whenever a woman is onscreen), both during and in-between its many action scenes. Reese and Wernick made their name writing films that blend wild action, raunchy comedy, and heart, but add Bay to the equation and it seems to throw their whole formula off.

Like most original big-budget projects nowadays, 6 Underground is positioned to serve as the beginning of a potential franchise. It's not a bad idea, honestly; with a more tasteful story and a little less "Bayhem", a sequel could take advantage of the elements that work in the first movie (like the cast's chemistry and its terrific stunts) and deliver an experience that's still bombastic, but more cohesively and entertainingly so. And with 6 Underground being available to stream at home, those who would've skipped on watching it in theaters are more likely to give it a shot now. Whether they will actually like what they see enough to want more, well, you'll have to ask the Netflix algorithm about that one.

NEXT: Watch the Final 6 Underground Trailer

6 Underground is now streaming on Netflix. It is 127 minutes long and is rated R for strong violence and language throughout, bloody images and some sexual content.

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6 underground.

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• DVD & Streaming

6 Underground

• Action/Adventure , Drama , War

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In Theaters

• December 13, 2019
• Ryan Reynolds as One; Mélanie Laurent as Two; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Three; Ben Hardy as Four; Adria Arjona as Five; Dave Franco as Six; Corey Hawkins as Seven; Lior Raz as Rovach Alimov; Payman Maadi as Murat Alimov; Elena Rusconi as Arianna

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• Michael Bay

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Movie review.

Most of us can shut out the tragedies of the world by shutting off the TV. But there are some who refuse to block out cruelty and suffering. They’re determined to do something about it instead.

And they’re known only by their numbers.

The leader of the pack is Agent One. An arrogant, seemingly heartless tech billionaire, Agent One decides one day to fight the wickedness of the world by assembling a pack of rogue representatives, each with their own set of evil-banishing talents and skills.

There’s Agent Two, a beautiful, blonde former member of the CIA. Agent Three, a sentimental hitman. Agent Four, a young, talented thief known as the “Skywalker.” Agent Five, a stunning brunette doctor. Agent six, a young man with a need for speed. And, finally, Agent Seven, a former military commander.

Each member brings knowledge and deadly potential to the table. The only catch is that these agents must be willing to leave their former lives behind, faking their own deaths, in order to pursue justice for the sake of humanity.

But the pursuit of justice is rarely peaceful for this crew. Their skills—and their moral compass–are put to the test as they band together to take down a powerful, wicked dictator in a race against time.

Positive Elements

These agents believe, fundamentally, that they are providing a service to humanity by bringing justice to those the government ignores (albeit with quite the body count along the way and some morally questionable choices to boot). That said, these agents each have moments where they show shreds of humanity. And if there’s a lesson they learn along the way, it’s that they’re better off together than alone.

An evil dictator is overthrown by his brother who wants justice and peace for his people.

Spiritual Elements

Agent One, as the narrator, tells listeners that in order to get “off the grid” you must become “like a ghost” whose soul departs after death.

A cross is seen on a wall inside a Catholic hospital where nuns attend to the sick and elderly. A group of agents plans to visit a city during its celebration of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

Sexual Content

Agent One has sex with a random woman he meets while on a mission. The two make out. We see him in boxers and her in a thong and bra, and it’s insinuated that they have sex. The next morning they lie in bed together; he’s shirtless and she’s in a silk nightgown.

Agents Two and Three also make out and take off most of their clothing. We likewise see them in skimpy undergarments, and it’s also insinuated that they have sex.

A group of wealthy men hire strippers and prostitutes to come up to a hotel suite (the women wear bras, thongs and other lingerie). One man graphically has sex with a woman. (We see her naked rear and explicit movements.)

Women frantically exit a ship in their bikinis. Agent One makes graphic jokes about masturbation and genital size.

Violent Content

This flick, from start to finish, is intensely violent. Cars explode in nearly every scene … along with the people inside them. Innocent civilians get hit by cars and run over. Poles and other miscellaneous objects impale those on the run.

When things aren’t exploding, men and women engage in hand-to-hand combat and violent shoot-outs. We see people shot in every imaginable area, including brutal point-blank blasts to the head and chest. Blood often gushes from open wounds. A man’s nose is blown off, and another loses his head as his dead, decapitated body slumps forward. A man’s teeth are knocked out of his mouth in slow motion. A woman stabs a man’s hand with a screwdriver. A magnetic pulse throws people up against a wall as knives pierce their bodies.

Agent One graphically recounts how a man’s eye was gouged out. Later, he holds that same eye to gain access into a phone. A doctor extracts a bullet from a woman’s abdomen as blood sprays on her face and in all directions.

Evil dictator Romach Alimov tells his generals and followers that he wants to inspire fear in his people by blowing up schools and hospitals and by killing the youth of the country. As Romach launches his evil plan, he attacks his own people with gas bombs and other chemical weapons. As a result, thousands of peoples are displaced and forced to flee. Children and families sit in poverty and anguish as they plead for help and rescue. Elsewhere, dead bodies litter the ground, and one man is beaten to death.

In order to eliminate potential threats, Romach has a group of his generals thrown off a building, where they plummet to their deaths. A captain grieves the death of his men during battle. Fallen soldiers lie in closed caskets. Agent Three makes a young girl an orphan when he kills her father.

Agents One through Seven fake their own deaths.

Crude or Profane Language

God’s name is misused about 10 times, often paired with “d–n” and “d–mit.” Jesus’ name is abused several times as well. The f-word is heard more 80 times and the s-word nearly 40. Other profanities include multiple utterances of “p—y,” “a–hole,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “a–,” “h—” and the British vulgarity, “wanker.” We also hear the c-word.

A group of nuns is nearly run over by a car and each of them performs crude hand gestures in return. Other people use crude hand gestures as well.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Men and women alike consume shots of hard liquor, cocktails, beer, wine and champagne. A few men smoke cigars and make jokes about getting drunk.

Other Negative Elements

An evil dictator fondly admires a painting of Napoleon. A group of rogue criminals steals expensive jewelry. Men and women gamble at a casino in Las Vegas. An agent tells a group of friends that “marriage and mortgages” are bad ideas. During a play, a woman spits in a man’s face onstage. A drunken man urinates on a bathroom floor (we don’t see any exposed body parts except for his bare thighs).

6 Underground is an action-packed “thriller” from start to finish, directed by none other than Michael Bay. And, as you might assume when you hear that name, intense violence, graphic sexual scenes and crude language are the main ingredients in this Netflix original.

So what sets this apart from all the other flicks that rely on the same ingredients? Well, a big name like Ryan Reynolds. And an underlying plot that wants you to think justice is best doled out by rogue agents bent on spilling blood.

There’s not much to see here, really. Michael Bay’s Netflix debut is little more than endless explosions, an unbelievable plot and explicit content. Oh, and Ryan Reynolds.

Kristin Smith

Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).

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6 Underground (2019)

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6 Underground Review

13 Dec 2019

6 Underground

It’s become common for directors who have made a movie with Netflix to wax lyrical about the near total freedom that’s given to them. While that autonomy can mean we get films like The Irishman from Martin Scorsese , it can also lead to films like Michael Bay ’s 6 Underground which, with a rumoured budget of $150 million, is on a par with 2017’s Netflix tentpole Bright . The latter defied the negative reviews and became a massive hit, and the streaming giant will be hoping that their latest expensive gamble pulls off something similar. For this is Bayhem in its purest form, and that’s for the worse instead of the better.

The mercs against the world plot (such as there is one), which is explained over and over and over again despite a lengthy opening car-chase sequence and flashbacks designed to catch us up, is laden with potential. 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.

This is Michael Bay at his most irresponsible and gory.

There’s something to be said for the fact that Bay is such a distinctive auteur that you need only watch the first five minutes of 6 Underground — which has some impressive vehicular moments to boot — to know exactly who’s behind the camera. It’s just frustrating that that unique visual style goes hand in hand with other elements that are now part and parcel of the Bay experience. From the incoherent editing to the objectification of women to the over-excessive and nasty violence, which is at times perpetrated by the characters we’re meant to be rooting for, this is Bay at his most irresponsible and gory.

As for the people in front of the camera, it should be no surprise that Reynolds — who is working from a screenplay penned by Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — gets all the best lines, and he remains fun to watch even though we don’t learn much about his character as the movie progresses. The rest of One’s team fare less well, falling somewhere between the bare minimum of characterisation and, in the case of Adria Arjona ’s ‘Five’, absolutely nothing at all. Thankfully, Corey Hawkins infuses his sniper with decency that the movie sorely needs, and Mélanie Laurent seems to know exactly what movie she’s in and acts accordingly.

Ultimately, though, 6 Underground will have you asking a ton of questions about many of its bizarre choices, including but not limited to: Why replace the driver on your team with a sniper? Why are the team taking orders from the billionaire even though he’s clearly the worst leader of all time? The film is less concerned with answering these than it is in plunging you into the next heavily stylised action sequence. Such is the Bay way.

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Movie Review – 6 Underground (2019)

December 16, 2019 by Shaun Munro

6 Underground , 2019.

Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Corey Hawkins, Ben Hardy, and Dave Franco.

Meet a new kind of action hero. Six untraceable agents, totally off the grid. They’ve buried their pasts so they can change the future.

The on-paper appeal of  6 Underground speaks for itself; a Michael Bay film starring Ryan Reynolds, written by Deadpool screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, and dropping day-and-date on Netflix. No matter your own possible (probable?) vitriol for Bay, it’s in the very least a morbidly curious proposition, to see how well Bay’s havoc-wreaking sensibilities mesh with the streaming platform’s ambitious desire to deliver multiplex-caliber tentpole films to their streaming platter.

And though the constituent elements certainly intrigue, this is a flatly generic action movie melange. It’s effectively Bay’s Suicide Squad , as a billionaire magnet magnate (important later) simply named “One” (Ryan Reynolds) puts together a team of specialists – as played by Mélanie Laurent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Corey Hawkins, Ben Hardy, and Dave Franco – to topple corrupt governments and kill Real Bad Guys.

Not a bad hook by any means, but one hobbled almost immediately by its achingly simplistic, video game-aping globe-trotting set-pieces – which perfectly match its video game-indebted plot – where visual coherence is only a secondary or perhaps even a tertiary concern.

Take the opening chase sequence in Florence, the narrative particulars of which don’t matter at all. This frantic 20-minute vehicular and on-foot chase seems entirely within Bay’s wheelhouse given his history, and yet, shots are bafflingly hacked up into mere fractions of a second, to the extent viewers are liable to be at least irritated if not fighting off a debilitating migraine.

Things thankfully calm down a bit later on – a Hong Kong skyscraper showdown half-way through is the dubious highlight. And yet, the whole still feels oddly undercooked for Bay who, a master of cinematic bombast, clearly misses the steady pull of an IMAX camera system (quite literally, given the amount of infuriating shaky cam on offer here). One benefit of the slightly  reduced scale compared to the Transformers movies, however, is that 6 Underground runs barely two hours in length, an incredible rarity for a filmmaker who has basically built his brand on over-egging the pudding.

The cinematography, especially when viewed in 4K HDR, is undeniably appealing whenever Bay slows things down enough for the audience to focus on anything – usually one of the seemingly hundreds of paid product placements noticeable throughout – but if audiences expect Bay to take things to their technical zenith as recompense for the idiocy of the storytelling, the trade doesn’t feel quite so worth it this time.

This is compounded by the disappointingly lacklustre script; character backstories are ladled out with just slightly less perfunctoriness than in Suicide Squad , in that characters here get entire scenes devoted to their origins rather than mere portions of a montage. But it’s mostly in one ear and out the other; they’ve all got a tortured past and aren’t that terrible really. The gist is the dull same across the lot, and so stock you’ll likely lose track of it all long before the movie ends.

The moment-to-moment writing meanwhile lacks the peppy  Deadpool flair; juvenile quips are fielded out as well as can be expected by the cast, though rarely raise much of a chuckle. It’s all too reliant on vomiting pop-culture references at the audience while lacking the charming playfulness of Ryan Reynolds’ R-rated superhero – no matter how much a quip-happy Reynolds tries here. He’s very nearly Wade Wilson sans-superpowers, by the way.

Typically for Bay though not-so-typically for Wernick and Reese, tonal issues abound throughout. If the Deadpool movies walk on a delicate razor’s edge of dishing up brutal violence amid thigh-slapping one-liners, there’s a genuine mean-spiritedness to much of the carnage on offer here. Characters are offed in a number of gory ways, pedestrians are violently wiped out like they’re nothing, and then we’re asked to laugh at an “hilarious” joke. For those who found Bay’s Pain & Gain too tonally unwieldy, 6 Underground will be an absolute nightmare.

This all adds up to a malnourished effort that takes talented actors like Reynolds, Laurent, Franco, Hawkins, and Hardy, and does little memorable with them. Reynolds is desperately trying to keep the whole thing aloft with his comedic rat-a-tat charm offensive, and Hardy gets a few surprisingly effective dramatic scenes, but for the most part the characters (and therefore the actors) feel more like props than people.

It’ll be interesting to see how general audiences respond to the film; it’s a big screen entertainment made for the small screen with a bevy of talented actors and clear franchise potential.

There’s an obvious allure to watching a movie like this day-and-date at home, and with the feeling that viewers are getting a new $150 million Michael Bay movie for “free” as part of their Netflix dues, it’s quite probable many will deem it “good enough” – that is, passable cinematic white noise after a hard day’s work. It’s certainly more ripe for the sequel treatment than the streamer’s 2017 Will Smith-starring fantasy slop-fest Bright , that’s for sure.

Though not without its amusing moments, Michael Bay’s latest is too chaotically edited and scattershot to realise its grandiose potential.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Shaun Munro – Follow me on  Twitter  for more film rambling.

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