NEW YORK, NY.- The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer, but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by AI: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?

“The Union,” directed by Julian Farino, kicks off in Trieste, Italy, with a blatant retread of the first “M:I” installment: The agents are on a mission to retrieve a traitor with a stolen hard drive. Suddenly, violence breaks out, and almost the whole team is killed. A survivor from the group, Roxanne (Halle Berry), pitches her boss, Tom (J.K. Simmons), on who to turn to for help: “If he’s anything like that guy I remember,” she says, “he’s exactly who we need.”

“He” is her onetime boyfriend, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), now a construction worker in New Jersey who is hooking up with their seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne hasn’t seen him in 25 years when she approaches him in a bar. His credentials are that he is, in Roxanne’s words, “a nobody”: Because of the nature of the pilfered intelligence on the drive, she and Tom need someone who has left virtually no civic footprint.

Besides, their spy outfit, the Union — so covert that half the intelligence community doesn’t know it exists and the other half regrets finding out, Roxanne says, as if reciting a tagline — prefers blue-collar guys to Ivy League suits. They are, in theory, way more fun than the CIA (Stephen Campbell Moore appears as a stiff from Langley.) Mike used to be a star athlete and is accustomed to spending all day on a sky-high beam. With that background, shouldn’t a 3 1/2-minute training montage suffice?

The other Union members are defined largely by their specialties — physical force (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), psychology (Alice Lee), computing (Jackie Earle Haley) — and the movie makes a few feeble feints at fish-out-of-water humor. (Mike may never have left the tristate area before, but does he really not know what side of the road the British drive on?)

The gimmick is that “The Union,” in addition to being an action film, is also a sort of comedy of remarriage for Roxanne and Mike, except that the screenwriters, Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, haven’t brought much in the way of levity to the relationship. Nor have they applied much ingenuity to the big set pieces. Raiding a house full of Eastern European mercenaries to steal … a cellphone? And hasn’t the high-stakes, high-tech auction been done before? It says something about the movie’s poverty of imagination that during a public confrontation in a Croatian piazza, the filmmakers barely acknowledge the presence of bystanders.

There is one solid bit of action in which Mike gets an opportunity to show off his high-beam-walking skills, and the car wrangler has helpfully color-coordinated the vehicles in the climactic chase (purple, orange, blue), so it’s easy to follow who is where. It is much more difficult to care.

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‘The Union’Rated PG-13. Ho-hum action, dirty talk. Running time: 1 hours 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.