I’m no stranger to lament when it comes to the disintegration of quality in what passes for movies today, but then along comes a bucket of swill like The Union to remind me things are even worse than I thought. This contrived, pointless, blindingly boring Nutflix vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s careers alive. Berry’s beauty is pleasant enough for a single-star rating, but the rest arrives six feet under and stays that way.

She plays Roxanne, a sexy spy and two-fisted killer who works for a powerful secret agency called “The Union,” dedicated to saving the free world. (It’s not clear from what.) After a job that goes wrong in Trieste, Italy, resulting in a colossal massacre, The Union decides it needs a new face, plain as pizza dough and unrecognizable to the criminal underworld (translation: i.e., a nobody). Roxanne thinks immediately of her old high school boyfriend Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a construction worker in New Jersey whose banal life of sophistication and adventure extends no further than climbing ladders and hanging out with his brain-dead buddies drinking beer. When she looks him up to renew old memories, he moves in for a clinch, but instead of a kiss, she stabs him in the neck with a hypodermic tranquilizer and he wakes up in London, where the boss of The Union (J.K. Simmons) encourages Roxanne to teach him the power of persuasion any way she can. 

Mike hasn’t seen Roxanne for 25 years, and now she’s recruiting him to risk his life as an innocent, inexperienced and untrained secret 007. The purpose of all this hugga-mugga is neither coherent nor believable, but the lure of being the next James Bond, delivering five million dollars to an army of the world’s most dangerous international thugs while simultaneously falling for a sexy spy with an assault weapon, convinces Mike to join The Union immediately (provided, of course, that he gets back to Jersey in time to be the best man in a pal’s wedding). He’s never been anywhere beyond downtown Hoboken, but before you can say Rambo, he’s dodging bullets, leaping from London rooftops, and driving on the wrong side of the street. The movie doesn’t make one lick of sense, which means it falls perfectly in line with most of the other moronic time-wasters that are polluting the ozone these days.

Roxanne focuses on rigorous physical and psychological training to prepare Mike for his first mission: infiltrating an auction offering stolen intelligence information to the highest bidder for hundreds of millions to retrieve a hard drive containing the names and identities of every spy in the history of Western civilization which, if obtained by the wrong spies, could destroy the free world. In a movie composed of endless predictable cliches, it’s got Iranian terrorists, a motorcycle race through the Italian streets, mediocre explosions and shootouts we’ve seen before in scores of Tom Cruise programmers. The goofball heroics are so second-rate they rob the film of any personality of its own. Hack director Julian Farino lacks the talent and the interest to explain what The Union is all about in terms anyone can understand. The script by joe barton and David Guggenheim never rises above a second-grade level, and there is nothing original or engaging about the film or the shallow performances in it. Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg have zero chemistry, but who can blame them for being so bland in a movie that reads like a manual from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?  

It’s not surprising for an action picture to be this humorless, but how can any film be so noisy, deadly and boring at the same time? The Union is to movies what salami on rye is to four-star gastronomy.

Published 16 August 2024, 20:13 IST

Singer and songwriter Jack Russell, who scored hard-rock hits in the 1980s with his band Great White and who survived a Rhode Island nightclub fire in 2003 that killed 100 people, has died. He was 63.

His death at his home in Southern California was announced Thursday in a statement on Instagram, which said he “passed peacefully” in the presence of family members and friends. K.L. Doty, with whom Russell wrote a 2024 memoir, said the cause was Lewy body dementia and multiple system atrophy, though she declined to say when Russell died.

The singer revealed in July that he was retiring from the road as a result of those conditions. “I am unable to perform at the level I desire and at the level you deserve,” he wrote on Instagram.

A product of the Los Angeles club scene of the late 1970s, Great White played scuzzy but tuneful rock in the proudly debauched hair-metal tradition; Mark Kendall’s guitars chugged and squealed, while Russell’s voice could evoke the manly shriek of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.

The band first charted on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1987 with the bluesy “Rock Me,” in which Russell assured a woman that “if you stay the night we’ll make the wrong seem right.” Its biggest single was a rowdy cover of Ian Hunter’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1989 and drove the group’s album “…Twice Shy” to sales of more than 2 million copies. “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was nominated for best hard rock performance at the Grammy Awards in 1990.

Great White’s commercial fortunes declined throughout the ’90s as grunge and alternative rock displaced hair metal on the radio and MTV; the band broke up in 2001. Yet the next year Russell and Kendall formed a splinter group called Jack Russell’s Great White that began touring clubs around the country.

On Feb. 20, 2003, a pyrotechnic display during the band’s set at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, R.I., ignited soundproofing insulation lining the venue’s walls and ceiling, leading to a fire that quickly engulfed the club. Among the 100 people who died was the band’s guitarist, Ty Longley; an additional 230 were reported injured.

The group’s tour manager and the Station’s owners were later charged with involuntary manslaughter; Russell and other Great White members agreed to pay $1 million in a settlement with survivors and families of the fire’s victims.

Russell, who was born in Montebello in 1960, went on to play with a reunited version of the original Great White until the band broke up again and he reformed Jack Russell’s Great White. That band’s most recent album, a tribute to Led Zeppelin, came out in 2021; this year, Russell teamed with another hair-metal veteran, Tracii Guns of L.A. Guns, for a duo LP titled “Medusa.”

Russell’s survivors include his wife, Heather Ann Russell, and his son Matthew Hucko.

On Instagram on Thursday, his former bandmates in Great White sent their condolences to Russell’s family and said it was “a privilege and joy to share the stage with him — many shows, many miles and maximum rock.”