6 Underground

I watched 6 Underground on a Tuesday afternoon while eating a bowl of cereal that had gone slightly soggy because I spent ten minutes trying to figure out why the opening car chase in Florence seemed to be ignoring the linear flow of time. It didn’t matter. By the time Ryan Reynolds made his third quip about mid-2000s pop culture, I realized that Michael Bay wasn't making a movie; he was hosting a $150 million tantrum against the concept of subtlety.

Released in late 2019, this was Netflix’s ultimate "blank check" moment. Before the pandemic shifted our viewing habits toward cozy baking shows and "prestige" limited series, the streaming giant was desperate to prove it could play in the big leagues of the summer blockbuster. They handed the keys to the kingdom to Michael Bay, the sultan of "Bayhem," and told him to go nuts. The result is a film that feels like it was edited by a squirrel on a heavy caffeine bender. It is loud, it is gorgeous, and it makes absolutely no sense, which is exactly why it has carved out a niche as a modern cult favorite for people who find Fast & Furious a bit too intellectual.

The Art of the Overkill

The premise is pure 80s action cheese updated for the "move fast and break things" billionaire era. Ryan Reynolds plays "One," a tech genius who fakes his own death to lead a squad of ghosts—specialists who have also "died"—to topple a generic dictator. It’s a superhero movie where the superpower is just having an unlimited budget and a total lack of a moral compass.

What makes this a fascinator for me is how it represents the peak of contemporary action technology. This isn't the gritty, handheld realism of the Bourne era. This is "The Volume" before The Volume was a thing—seamless CGI blended with practical stunts that look genuinely life-threatening. The opening twenty-minute chase through Florence is a masterpiece of technical arrogance. They are drifting a bright green Alfa Romeo through museums and over pedestrian walkways in a way that feels like a hate crime against European architecture. It is glorious. It’s the kind of sequence where you can tell the DP, Bojan Bazelli, was told to make every frame look like a high-end cologne commercial shot inside a volcano.

A Squad of Beautiful Cogs

While Ryan Reynolds is doing the "Deadpool but with more money" routine, the real joy comes from the supporting cast trying to survive the sheer velocity of the script. Mélanie Laurent is arguably the most overqualified person in the history of action cinema here; watching the star of Inglourious Basterds stoically stitch up a wound in a bouncing car while Dave Franco screams is a specific kind of tonal whiplash I didn’t know I needed.

Then you have Ben Hardy as "Four," the parkour expert. In an era where we’re used to seeing actors dangling from green-screen wires, the stunt work involving the rooftop chases in this film feels refreshingly physical. It’s a reminder that even in the streaming age, there is still a place for actually throwing humans off very tall buildings for our amusement. The film treats its characters like high-performance tools rather than people, which fits the 2019 vibe of "optimization" perfectly. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, and the rest of the crew fill their archetypes with enough charisma to keep you from asking why they don't just call the authorities.

The Secret History of Bayhem

Part of why 6 Underground has developed a "love it or leave it" cult status is the behind-the-scenes madness that feels like it belongs to another era of Hollywood. Apparently, the production was so chaotic that Ryan Reynolds famously filmed a social media video in the middle of a high-speed chase, where an actual car crash happens in the background behind him—unscripted and terrifyingly real.

Here are a few other bits that make the film’s existence even weirder: The Florence government actually allowed the crew to drive on the "Vasari Corridor," a literal 16th-century passage that usually bans everything but high-end tourists. The parkour stunts were largely performed by the British team Storror, who are legends in the YouTube subculture; their inclusion shows Bay’s weirdly tuned-in sense for what looks "cool" on a smartphone screen. Michael Bay reportedly used so much practical pyro that the "magnet" ship sequence at the end had to be carefully managed to avoid actually demagnetizing the crew's watches and equipment. Despite the $150 million budget, the script by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (the Deadpool guys) feels like it was written on a dare to see how many "f-bombs" Netflix would allow in a single scene. * The film’s "One" is loosely inspired by the idea of an Elon Musk-type figure using his wealth for global intervention—a theme that has only become more awkward and relevant since 2019.

Ultimately, 6 Underground is a movie that hates your retinas and wants your eardrums to file for divorce. It’s a perfect artifact of that pre-2020 window where streaming services thought the only way to win was to be louder than the cinema. I can’t call it a "good" movie in the traditional sense—it’s too frantic, too mean-spirited, and the editing is a literal assault on the human nervous system. But as a piece of pure, unadulterated spectacle designed to be watched on a 4K TV while you're scrolling through your phone? It’s kind of a masterpiece of its own ridiculous genre. It’s the loudest ghost story you’ll ever see.