6 Underground Review

Streaming money bought Bay total freedom and it exposes exactly what an editor and a studio were doing for him. The film opens with a car chase through Florence that runs roughly twenty minutes, kills a great deal of scenery and establishes nothing about anyone, and the film never recovers a sense of stakes because it has already spent its loudest currency in the first reel. The characters are literally numbers, One through Seven, which is presented as a stylish conceit and functions as an excuse not to write them.

Ryan Reynolds delivers the same improvised deflection he delivers everywhere, and the flashbacks meant to give the team pasts are dropped in at random. The finale, which uses an enormous magnet on a yacht to kill people in ways the film finds hilarious, is the purest distillation of Bay's late style, expensive and weightless. There is a real film buried in the premise of vigilantes who no longer legally exist. Nobody went looking for it.