Review of 6 Underground (2019) by Whitewolf_1984 — 17 Dec 2019

This has the kind of full throttle action you expect from Michael Bay but apart from that the film is tacky, direct to video fare and a bad reflection on the once esteemed director. The action is solid with lots of real stunts and tangible explosions, CGI is thankfully at a minimum.

I think the obvious budget restrictions have forced Bay away from CGI heavy action scenes which does help keep the action grounded and believable. The car chases are the best part of the movie because they're done with all real cars crashing and exploding.

Secondly, the gun fights are well choreographed with loud shots and impact damage. Unfortunately, the overuse of dutch angles and "shaky" cam spoil the action, you get a nice few shots of some cool action sometimes in excellent slow mo and then you get distracted by the ridiculous camera work.

It gets annoying by the end and the amount of lens flare and bloom usage is worse than in a JJ Abrams flick. The cinematography is amateur and dated. The editing and stupid amount of jump cuts is horrendous, every scene even the calmer scenes are visual jumbled messes.

I think he wants the film to look flash and exciting but instead it's off putting and tacky looking. Bay needs to stop ruining the look of his films like this. The story is bad and dumb, it's a cheesy 80's cheap action movie storyline, a dictator mindlessly killing people, just embarrassing like a bad Rambo part 2 parody.

The flow and pacing of the movie is all over the place, you have flashbacks to the characters pasts scattered everywhere and you flip flop from one location to the next way to much. The pace is slow fast slow fast.

....... it's dizzying! The movie shoe horns in a lazily done moral to the story which just falls flat and feels so out of place. Bay must think this film is higher thinking stuff when in fact it's just a below average action romp.

The wit and humour of Ryan Reynolds slightly improve the watch but the rest of the cast are disposable with pathetic corny dialogue and eye rolling bad jokes. There are 3 big incredible set pieces during the just over 2 hour runtime which are really fun except for the irritating camera idiocy.

The locales the film goes to are spectacular and the big explosions are well done, the pyrotechnics team did a great job. Without Ryan Reynolds or Netflix budgeting and streaming the film, it definitely would have gone straight past the cinema and onto dvd.

If you didn't mind watching the last Transformers you might like this from Bay though it's a million miles away from his Armageddon or The Rock. Michael Bay has become a shadow of his former self and this film is evidence of the fact.