I am no stranger to complaining about the decline in quality of what passes for movies today, but then comes a bucket of scum like The Union to remind me that things are even worse than I thought. This contrived, pointless, terribly boring Nutflix vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep the careers of Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg alive. Berry’s beauty is pleasant enough for a one-star review, but the rest gets six feet under and stays there.

She plays Roxanne, a sexy spy and badass assassin working for a powerful secret agency called “The Union,” dedicated to saving the free world. (It’s not clear from what.) After a job gone wrong in Trieste, Italy, results in a colossal massacre, The Union decides it needs a new face, one as plain as pizza dough and unrecognizable to the criminal underworld (translation: i.e., a nobody). Roxanne immediately thinks of her old high school friend Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a construction worker in New Jersey whose mundane life of sophistication and adventure extends no further than climbing ladders and drinking beer with his brain-dead buddies. When she visits him to refresh old memories, he approaches her for a clinch, but instead of a kiss, she jabs a sedative into his neck and he wakes up in London, where the head of The Union (JK Simmons) encourages Roxanne to teach him the power of persuasion in any way she can.

Mike hasn’t seen Roxanne in 25 years, and now she recruits him to risk his life as an innocent, inexperienced and untrained 007. The purpose of all this rambling is neither coherent nor believable, but the lure of being the next James Bond, delivering five million dollars to an army of the world’s most dangerous international gangsters, while simultaneously falling in love with a sexy spy with an assault weapon, convinces Mike to join the Union immediately (assuming, of course, that he returns to Jersey in time to be best man at a friend’s wedding). He’s never been beyond downtown Hoboken, but before you can say Rambo, he’s dodging bullets, jumping off London rooftops, and driving on the wrong side of the road. The film is completely illogical and joins the ranks of most other idiotic time-wasters that pollute the ozone layer today.

Roxanne focuses on rigorous physical and psychological training to prepare Mike for his first mission: to infiltrate an auction where hundreds of millions of stolen intelligence will be offered to the highest bidder in order to obtain a hard drive containing the names and identities of every spy in the history of Western civilization, which, if obtained by the wrong spies, could destroy the free world. In a film made up of endless predictable cliches, there are Iranian terrorists, a motorcycle race through the streets of Italy, mediocre explosions and shootouts of the sort we’ve seen dozens of Tom Cruise programmers do. The silly exploits are so second-rate that they rob the film of any personality of its own. Hack director Julian Farino lacks the talent and interest to explain what The Union is all about words that everyone can understand. The script by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim never rises above second-grade level, and neither the film nor the perfunctory performances are original or engaging. Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg have no chemistry whatsoever, but who can blame them for being so boring in a film that reads like a Massachusetts Institute of Technology handbook?

It’s not surprising that an action film is so humorless, but how can a film be so loud, deadly and boring at the same time? The Union is to the cinema what rye salami is to four-star gastronomy.