6 Underground

Michael Bay returns, and while these were words that used to leave yours truly stricken with terror and afraid to approach a movie theater, things have changed a bit. First off, this one is straight to Netflix, so I can do stuff like pet my dog to calm down when the editing gets too frantic. Secondly, I think Bay seems to know he’s totally ridiculous by now. Like his Bad Boys 2, in which he seemed to be parodying himself, this one is so over the top it winds up being a little on the fun side. Ryan Reynolds stars as a tycoon who becomes a “ghost,” in that he has faked his own death in order to seek vengeance on bad people. He puts together a team of death fakers, which includes Melanie Laurent, Andrea Arjona and Dave Franco. They go after bad people in a series of car chasing, building scaling sequences that often culminate in some of 2019’s most glorious on-screen carnage. Reynolds is just doing Reynolds here, and that’s not a bad thing. Either Bay has calmed down his editing style, or I’ve just gotten used to it. Either way, I’ve found a place where I can sort of enjoy the madness that is Michael Bay, at least in the case of this film.