“The Union,” an action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, could have been more fun. Or more exciting. The film certainly had many advantages, including big stars and a globetrotting budget. But it lacks a certain charm that could make it more than the Netflix movie playing in the background.

“The Union,” which airs Friday, is a fairy tale — a very male one, about a middle-aged average man (Wahlberg) whose life has never quite gotten off the ground and who is recruited out of the blue as a spy. Mike is a broke construction worker who still lives with his mother in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey (yes, there are Springsteen songs) and hangs out in bars with his old friends. His biggest recent success was a one-night stand with his seventh-grade English teacher, and the only event on his calendar is his friend’s wedding in a few weeks. He’s the best man.

Which is just to say that it’s a refreshing change of pace for Mike when his old high school girlfriend Roxanne (Berry) comes into the bar one night looking like a punk-rock superhero in a leather motorcycle jacket. Glamorous and confident, and not bothered by her hair falling in her eyes, she’s clearly found a life outside of Patterson. The problem, or a problem, I guess, is that we already know what she’s doing. Rather than putting the audience in Mike’s shoes, as a fish out of water trying to figure out why he’s waking up in a luxury suite in London after meeting his high school ex in his hometown bar, “The Union” starts with Roxanne. It begins with a sort of “Mission: Impossible”-esque rescue gone wrong in Trieste, Italy, where most of her team members perish. She decides that to start over, they need some working-class grit.

The idea for the film came from Stephen Levinson, Wahlberg’s longtime business partner who brought another mediocre Netflix action comedy, Spenser Confidential, to life. It was largely directed by Julian Farino, a veteran actor who has directed many episodes of Entourage, and the screenplay was written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there’s something charming about the idea that anyone, given the opportunity and a few weeks of training, could be a reasonably successful international spy. In the films, women learn that they are secretly royalty, and men learn that they are secretly great spies.

But The Union never really gets going tonally. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, although I think it would prefer to be one. JK Simmons is given too little scope as the head of this secret agency that also uses underrated characters like Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Alice Lee. One of the more moderately successful running gags is that Mike’s undercover character is from Boston (get it?). A beefy English henchman even has an intimate conversation with him about “Good Will Hunting.”

Berry and Wahlberg get on well, they understand each other well, but there’s no chemistry at all. That wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t also tell a make-or-break love story between a woman who has forgotten her roots and a man who must forget them. I could never really get used to the idea that either of them is actually still thinking about their high school relationship and what went wrong. In the meantime, you’ve had a lot of time to reflect on decisions you made when you were 17. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or even Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but maybe the story should have been changed in this case to better serve the actors.

That’s petty for something with much bigger problems. And ultimately, “The Union” suffers the same fate as many expensive streaming movies before it: There’s just not enough — action, comedy, romance, art — to demand (or, rather, deserve) your full attention.

“The Union,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “scenes of strong violence, explicit material and some strong language.” Running time: 107 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press