The announcement that Michael Bay and Ryan Reynolds are teaming up for a film indicates that those flicking through Netflix ‘s assortment of presents around Christmas-time should be in for something significant in the high-concept, high-action department. (This despite Ryan’s originally tweeted description that it was ‘…the haunting story of One…a brooding, beautiful and sarcastic man who vows to take his pain and channel into changing the world for the better… an ode to the great Italian neorealist Fellini, but with fast cars, insane action, exotic locations and professional, gorgeous people where post-World War II Italy would normally be…‘
You might also remember his tweet from the set last year that pointed to what we can really expect…
6 Underground doesn’t have a huge amount of details about its exact plot, except we now know that it involves six talented individuals who are all trailblazers in their particular fields and who are then ‘ghosted’ (ie: have their deaths faked and their histories ‘scrubbed’ – their resources and skills now being used to make a difference, even though they may never get any credit for it). But now we at least have a teaser trailer to give us some context:
Reynolds is the man who brings them together and his fellow pool of talent includes the likes of Mélanie Laurent as a master CIA operative , Corey Hawkins as a skilled sniper, Adria Arjona as a battlefield doctor, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a hitman with a conscience, Ben Hardy as a top-rated parkour expert, Lior Raz, Payman Maadi and also Dave Franco as a getaway driver par-excellence. Together they travel through Europe trying to take down those the law can’t touch… Think of the tone as part of the same gravity-and-odds-defying Fast & Furious universe… with the script coming from the keyboard of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland and Deadpool).
While Reynolds has kept himself busy with projects such as the beloved Deadpool, the once prolific Bay has been less conspicuous as a director in the last few years. His most recent directorial credits being 2016’s 13 Hours and 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight, but his appearance on the Netflix schedules shouldn’t really be a massive surprise…he has acted as a producer on the likes of quality televisual outings such as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, The Purge and Black Sails and Netflix has had a notable year producing high-concept, high-visibility original content with some of the biggest names in the industry.
For future projects, Bay’s name has also been linked with Robopocalypse, which would seem him back in robotic turf in a story set after a future cybernetic uprising, though there’s no start date for that as yet.
6 Underground arrives on Netflix on 13th December…
