6 Underground Review: Bayhem at its Worst

Watching 6 Underground is like reading a string of one-word sentences –  Guns. Las Vegas. Ferraris. Sex. Melanie Laurent. Parkour. Headshot. Everything becomes a confusing mess of noise and images that you wonder what this movie is really trying to accomplish.

It is packed with high-budget, epilepsy-inducing, over-directed action scenes. Disorienting camera movements with long-angle close-ups and slow-motion shots are peppered throughout the sequences. There’s no rhythm nor reason for any of this, except that a bunch of sketchy people from a vaguely-defined secret group needs to shoot and blow up stuff.

With plenty of funding, poorly defined motivations, and stock characterization, it doesn’t really matter who’s who. It’s all about who they’re killing.

According to the script these off-the-grid vigilantes who call themselves ghosts are here to topple dictatorships and kill powerful bad men. It’s never clear why any of the characters have to take drastic measures to save the world. Since this is a Micheal Bay movie, a gazillionaire needs to engage in a soulless exercise of American jingoism with garden variety espionage.

None of the underutilized cast phoned it in but they’re left helpless by the script. Ryan Reynolds keeps falling into mediocre action films for some reason, but he’s charismatic enough.  Melanie Laurent steals all the scenes she’s in. There’s a creative sequence here in the final act (if you manage to get through all of it), but it’s buried underneath a mess that you’d immediately forget after the credits roll.

Micheal Bay has made some watchable films only when his indulgence is filtered into a seave of coherence. This helps make the editing and cardboard characters tolerable. The cast chemistry is a bonus. 6 Underground looks as if someone on Speed cobbled together months of stunt work in the editing room and called it a movie. I hope the actors were paid well to put this on their IMDB.