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A year or so ago the place where I was working in London hired out a few of its downstairs rooms to a film company that was shooting on location over the road. That day I had a very interesting lunch hour watching car chases and gunfights from my office window. Of course it would have been great if the film had been No Time To Die or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Paddington, Last Night in Soho or The Bourne Ultimatum or any other of the excellent movies shot in the city (I was actually also there for the Waterloo Station scene in that last one) but it’s this. Still, it’s always interesting to see a film crew at work no matter how generic and uninspiring the final movie.

The Union (which had the better title Our Man from Jersey when they were making it) is an entertaining enough film but it is so derivative of other things that I’m not sure it isn’t actually a parody. The plot revolves around a secret spy organisation that operates outside of the CIA or MI6 which is the Union of the title, much like the IMF or SHIELD, or The Kingsmen, UNCLE, UNIT, TENET, The Charter, The Chapter, Omega Sector, BPRD, Division, LEPRecon, Owsla or COVNET, to name a few. They recruit a member of the public who has to quickly learn how to survive in the world of espionage, as in the last Charlie’s Angels, Spy, North By Northwest, Kingsman, Red Sparrow, Bridge of Spies, Nikita, Tenet, The Courier, Fast & Furious 7, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Clear and Present Danger, Stormbreaker, Spy Kids and Cars 2, because they need an unknown operative following the theft of a list of all the secret agents in the Western World just as happened in Mission: Impossible and Skyfall and no doubt several other movies (you get the idea).

Of course the London setting extends beyond the view from my old desk so we get lots of car chases around deserted streets that as locals we know are never deserted. The secret HQ is in the BT Telecom Tower and we are also treated to a number of shots of this building made bigger on the skyline than it is in reality so as to make it seem a more significant structure than it is. (This made me wonder if they do the same thing in other films. I’m suddenly not so impressed with Tom Cruise climbing the Burj Khalifa.)

The hero is played by Mark Wahlberg and there are some nice moments where he reacts a little like a regular person would in his circumstances. In fact in terms of authenticity and having the UK Capital as a chief location there is also a line where another American pronounces Southwark with the w, which I wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or not. I do have to commend them on having their spies show a genuine sense of loss when one of their number is killed which is something you genuinely never see in these types of films.

The cast, which also includes Halle Berry and J. K. Simmons, carry things though and I had almost as much fun watching the whole thing as I did that one bit happening outside my window last Summer. It isn’t original but it keeps things going nicely and it’ll easily fill a couple of hours on the sofa.

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The Ripley Factor:

The kick ass super spy in this is a woman which is not something we’ve ever seen before. Oh, hang on…