Over the last few days, I’ve had a number of conversations about Michael Bay‘s 6 Underground, the notorious action auteur’s latest extravagant celebration of absurd excess. And while it’s not exactly a complex movie (though it may be a little deeper than you’d think), I’ve found that it’s remarkably difficult to talk about in the typical binary of quality. Is it good? Is it bad? I have no idea. Quite honestly, I doubt Michael Bay knows either. It simply is what it is—a very loud, very dumb, and consistently insane showcase for some of the greatest action scenes of the year. Like the Fast & Furious franchise and the Avengers movies and every other modern series, it’s a movie about family, as long as that family is constantly devising new reasons for things (and people) to blow up.
For some, 6 Underground will be an incomprehensible mess—edited to death, crude and vulgar, and overindulgent in all the wrong ways. Those viewers would not be incorrect. This is indeed a Michael Bay movie, and it has no shame about that. For others, that shamelessness—that sheer relentless, steadfast commitment to its atmosphere and style—will be the very quality that makes it one of the most entertaining movies of the year. Your mileage will vary, but after watching 6 Underground (twice, if you can believe it), I fall firmly and strongly into the latter camp. It’s utterly insane—and an absolute blast.
Embrace Death to Save the World
Before I can tell you what this movie is about, you have to know one thing: every character in 6 Underground is “dead.” They faked their own deaths for a greater cause—now, they have no names or identities, no countries of origin to claim as their own, and no families to visit ever again. The locus of this grand idea started with One (Ryan Reynolds), a billionaire who realized the limits of his charitable work and decided to break free of governmental inaction and capitalist limitations by dying in a freak accident. If you no longer exist, nobody knows that you’re lurking behind the scenes, pulling geopolitical moves in the most violent way possible. It’s stupid and ingenious, and that combination of polar opposites sums up the whole movie.
The team’s goal is to orchestrate a coup in Turgistan (a fictional country), which is currently run by a ruthless and cruel dictator (Lior Raz). His brother, Murat Alimov (Payman Maadi), is a kinder, stronger leader, and he’s the best man to lead to Turgistan into the future. One’s team is a messy group of misfits, but they all have their expressed purpose as a squad. Two (Mélanie Laurent) is a CIA expert with nerves of steel, while Three (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), her on-and-off flame, is a skilled former hitman. The others come with very specific skills: Four (Ben Hardy) is a parkour expert (aka Michael Bay‘s excuse to whip out the GoPro), Five (Adria Arjona) is a medical doctor, and Six (Dave Franco) is the group’s driver.
The film begins in Italy (though it jumps around so much that beginnings and endings are also irrelevant), with a chase scene so outrageous that it’s destined to be watched for years. Unfortunately, the team’s daring escape results in a tragic incident—which means that One has to recruit a new member. He finds Seven (Corey Hawkins), a soldier fraught with guilt over what he did or didn’t do while fighting overseas. For One and the original six, the anonymity is part of the job—everyone knows that if they screw up, they get left behind. But when Seven arrives, this team of dead misfits and weirdos becomes an oddball family for the very first time.
Bayhem to the Max
6 Underground‘s narrative couldn’t be simpler—kookier, cruder Fast & Furious characters attempt to topple a brutal regime—but the entire film is spectacular proof that execution is everything. This is both a compliment and warning. Bay and screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese employ a strange and unruly story structure, filled with borderline nonsensical time jumps and potentially needless exposition. Action beats and steady narrative progression are constantly interrupted by bits of backstory, and it can genuinely be hard to tell what is happening at different points.
Around the halfway mark, I began to wonder what this film would look like if it was told in the most straightforward way possible—beginning with One’s change of heart and progressing forward to the formation of the team and their mission. In all likelihood, this would result in a “better” movie in the conventional sense. However, it would take away from the frantic, discombobulating sensation that makes 6 Underground such a unique experience; if this was a generic, relatively normal action movie, would anyone even care?
I should be clear: this is a movie that absolutely feels like it was edited by three people (Roger Barton, William Goldenberg, and Calvin Wimmer). It is frenetic and chaotic and often impossible to follow—in any other case, it probably wouldn’t work. But in this instance, everything about 6 Underground—the editing, the story structure, the relentlessly quippy performances of Reynolds and the entire crew—feels deeply in sync with Bay‘s predilection for pure, unfiltered mayhem. From its music-filled montages to its outrageous setpieces, this is a film that always feels like a feature-length trailer. This is its essential aesthetic, and it sticks to that through thick and thin.
Good? Bad? Does It Even Matter?
Is that commitment to its crazed aesthetic a good thing or a bad thing? While I don’t want to appear as if I don’t have any concrete opinions on this movie, I really think traditional measures of quality are irrelevant here. By some purportedly objective measure, 6 Underground is probably bad—and yet that doesn’t really matter at all. Like it or loathe it, Bay goes for broke in the most stunning way possible, and we’re just along for the ride. He’s fully doing his own thing, littering the screen with explosions, ridiculous stuns, poop jokes, and everything in between with reckless abandon—often at the same time.
Maybe this is the point where I add the disclaimer that, for better or worse, I basically grew up with Bay‘s Transformers movies. For me, his style of action, when performed on the grandest scale possible, is the gold standard of blockbuster spectacle—I even still maintain that Transformers: Dark of the Moon has the best grand finale setpiece of any major series in recent memory. With this in mind, the experience of watching Bay execute outrageous, logic-defying action with a Netflix budget is something of a pure burst of adrenaline. Car chases, shootouts, attempted coups: it’s all a playground for Bay to bring his violent action fantasies to life. Plus, with the benefit of an R rating, Bay has the chance to bring his A-game, throwing bodies around like rag dolls and ratcheting the blood up to truly bananas levels. Netflix has its faults, but letting A-list directors have carte blanche will always be one of its most best assets.
With such a large volume of action, themes and characters are seemingly secondary concerns in 6 Underground—and that’s okay. The “family” stuff is an excuse for this to be the start of a franchise, and it serves its purpose as a recognizable Hollywood strategy. However, for a film from a director who loves flying American flags like a madman, the geopolitics may be slightly more fascinating than one would imagine. 6 Underground posits a world where American leadership is utterly useless—as one character says, the President doesn’t even know the location of Turgistan. With this foundation, the only necessity is a certain kind of vigilante justice on a global scale. That’s a fairly conservative moral and political argument that we don’t quite have time to examine here in great detail, but for a filmmaker who has frequently traded in jingoism and patriotism, it’s a notable and telling shift.
6 Underground: Conclusion
Okay, so maybe this says more about me than anything else, but I immensely enjoyed every minute of this wonderful nonsense. In a holiday season in which the biggest action movie played it relatively safe to disappointing results, 6 Underground‘s pure dose of Bayhem is even more of a welcome change of pace.
If every movie was like this, I think my brain would have turned to mush a long time ago. But as a rare case of utter indulgence, it’s a dumb, spectacular, and one-of-a-kind visceral journey.
What did you think of 6 Underground? What’s your favorite—or least favorite—Michael Bay movie? Let us know in the comments below!
6 Underground was released worldwide on Netflix on December 13th.
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