Going into Michael Bay's first offering to the streaming gods, it's important to remember that Michael Bay is - whether you like it or not - an auteur.
What's an auteur, you might ask? The definition of auteur is a director who influences their work so much that they cannot be mistaken for anyone else's. They are absolutely their ideas, their control, their ego, their everything. There is no collaboration anywhere.
Actors go along with this because, well, it's sometimes fun not to have to think too hard or create their own performance. For example, you can question why Good Actor™ Melanie Laurent is involved in something like this, or you can simply acknowledge that she's probably doing this because it's easy money and she won't have to put too much work into it. Ryan Reynolds, likewise, it's the same. He's playing a smart-ass superhero tech-bro billionaire who's trying his best to right the wrongs of the world. What a stretch!
The ensemble cast includes 'EastEnders' refugee Ben Hardy as a parkour expert with the worst English accent on an actual English person, Corey Hawkins from 'Straight Outta Compton', Adria Arjona, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and, yes, Dave Franco for one sequence in the movie. Ultimately though, they're not characters and they're not actors either. They're NPCs in a game that's being played by some unseen 16-year old boy in between sessions of YouTube searching and posting on TikTok.
Michael Bay, for all his faults, is doing what he's doing countless times before and will do until he decides to give up on directing and settle down for a quiet life of blowing stuff up on his own time. Maybe he does know how to direct a scene with a sense of tact and pacing, but there's no evidence of it here. Instead, what you have is merely explosions composted together with needle drops of bland pop-rock with some upskirting shots and sex scenes that have the tantalising nature of a drill going into your front teeth.
The script - and, really, that is stretching the absolute definition of the word - by Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick is as articulate as a fart on a walkie-talkie, and makes about as much sense. There's something to do with Ryan Reynolds' tech-bro billionaire wanting revenge on a [insert Arabic-sounding country name] dictator, a coup, something to do with magnets, and the fact that they've all faked their deaths.
At the top of this review of '6 Underground', it was stated that Michael Bay is an auteur. The catch is that his movies are all, by and large, pretty terrible. His brand of Bayhem isn't working any more, and injecting it with Netflix steroids / money isn't the answer to the problem, nor is bringing in Ryan Reynolds to fluff the thing into working either.
If you can forgive painfully edited action setpieces, chalkboard-scratching dialogue, the kind of music that advertising creatives use for their decks, and vascular stuntmen being thrown around a screen, then sure, there's something here in '6 Underground' for you. For everyone else, it's two hours wasted.
Bury this deep underground, build a motorway over it, and move on.
