Some guys are driving around Florence in a lime green Alfa Romeo. They are escaping countless other cars, SUVs, motorcycles and billions of bullets being shot. This is at the end of some type of mission which went very wrong. Inside are the driver who ends up dead after all this, the passenger called 1, a pretty Dr. 5, a CIA spook who has been shot and is being operated by 5. Elsewhere part of the team are an angry frustrated hitman, and a robber/parkour artist.

When this is over we learn that 1 is a self-made tech billionaire who decided to improve the world so he decided to assemble this team and take out bad guys. They all have to fake their deaths and then live as "ghosts." Their base is an old plane out in the plane graveyard in the California desert. The next mission is to take out the dictator of Turgistan. 1 replaces the driver with...a sniper for some reason. The plan involves staging a coup, taking out the bad dictator, and installing his brother in power. The dictator has his brother basically prisoner in a mansion. So first they have to free the brother, then take over the airwaves with a message to get the people to revolt, and finally grab the dictator and turn him over to the people to face justice.

All of this takes forever and is overly complicated and as with Bay movies, all the brain-frying action and noise eventually backfires and make you lose interest and track of whatever the main story is supposed to be. And as with most big budget action movies there's a dizzying amount of globe-trotting going on although here it seems they are going in circles around the same couple of countries often playing the unbelievable role of other countries.

In terms of characters, we learn that the hitman has a mother in a convalescent hospital, he starts a relationship with the CIA spook. For a moment there it seemed like we would learn how 1 recruited everybody on the team, but we only learn that for the robber and of course for the sniper. Infuriatingly underused is 5 played by the gorgeous Adria Arjona. We learn noting about her and she doesn't get to do a whole lot in the movie. What makes this movie a bit different is that even though the members of the team are all pros at their respective jobs, the missions tend to go awfully wrong, so that's a bit refreshing here. This isn't the glamorous team that plans impossible jobs and has everything go its way while posing around like models. We are also spared some type of sermonizing which action movies like to do as well of late.

I haven't seen Bay movies in decades, but I do enjoy the bright, colorful cinematography also used in 6 Underground. The action is cool, fun, violent, gory. But again somewhere 3/4 into the movie we needed a break from all the mayhem. The characters are ok, the story is alright. The script is "written-for-Reynolds" type stuff. Perhaps slightly less annoying than usual, but still, the bickering between 1 and the hitman could have been toned down. No surprise that it came from the same people behind Deadpool. Reynolds should distance himself from this stuff, it's starting to turn into a caricature of a caricature.

Recommended as a fun wild ride of an action movie.