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Keith Urban Plays Free Pop-up Concert in Alabama

FILE - Keith Urban performs during CMA Fest on Saturday, June 8, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Keith Urban performs during CMA Fest on Saturday, June 8, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)
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Keith Urban Plays Free Pop-up Concert in Alabama

FILE - Keith Urban performs during CMA Fest on Saturday, June 8, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Keith Urban performs during CMA Fest on Saturday, June 8, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)

Country singer Keith Urban gave just a few hours' notice before performing a free concert Friday night in the parking lot of a large convenience store and gas station in north Alabama.
Hundreds of people turned out for the show in Athens, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) south of Nashville. It was outside a Buc-ee's, a chain of roadside stores known for barbecue, The Associated Press reported.
“I came down to this Buc-ee's about a month ago. And when I left, I went, ‘It’d be kind of fun to do a show there,'” Urban told the crowd during the concert, according to an Instagram video posted by WAFF-TV in Huntsville, Alabama.
Urban said his “cave man brain” told him it would be fun to set up a little stage for a small audience.
“I swear to you, I thought maybe 100, 200 people,” Urban said as a video showed a larger crowd.
People started gathering hours before the show, news outlets reported.
“I was at work and we heard it on the radio that there was going to be a surprise concert at Buc-ee’s in Athens,” Cindy Wilson told FOX 54 WZDX-TV in Huntsville. “And I was like, ’Oh my God, it’s on my way home.' And it’s 15 minutes from my house. So I couldn’t believe it.”
While he was at the store, Urban also worked behind a food counter. A video showed him wearing a Buc-ee's T-shirt and apron as he poured barbecue sauce on some brisket and chopped the meat into smaller pieces.

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Movie Review: Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry Lead a Middling Spy Comedy in ‘The Union’

Mark Wahlberg, left, and Halle Berry, cast members in "The Union," pose together at the premiere of the Netflix film at the Egyptian Theatre, Monday, Aug. 12, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP)
Mark Wahlberg, left, and Halle Berry, cast members in "The Union," pose together at the premiere of the Netflix film at the Egyptian Theatre, Monday, Aug. 12, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP)
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Movie Review: Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry Lead a Middling Spy Comedy in ‘The Union’

Mark Wahlberg, left, and Halle Berry, cast members in "The Union," pose together at the premiere of the Netflix film at the Egyptian Theatre, Monday, Aug. 12, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP)
Mark Wahlberg, left, and Halle Berry, cast members in "The Union," pose together at the premiere of the Netflix film at the Egyptian Theatre, Monday, Aug. 12, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP)

“The Union,” an action comedy with Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, should have been more fun. Or more exciting. It certainly had a lot working in its favor, including big stars and a budget for globetrotting. But it’s lacking a certain charm that could help it be something more than the Netflix movie playing in the background.

“The Union,” streaming Friday, is a fairy tale — a very male one, about a middle-aged everyman (Wahlberg) whose life never quite got started and who gets recruited to be a spy out of the blue. Mike is a broke construction worker still living in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey (yes, there are Springsteen songs) with his mother and hanging with his old friends in bars.

That’s all to say that for Mike, it is a breath of fresh air when his old high school girlfriend Roxanne (Berry), walks into the bar one evening looking like a punk-rock superhero in a leather motorcycle jacket. Glamorous and confident and never bothered by the flop of hair getting in her eyes, she has clearly found a life outside Patterson.

The problem, or a problem, I think, is that we already know what she does. Instead of putting the audience in Mike’s shoes, as the fish out of water trying to figure out why he’s woken up in a luxury suite in London after meeting his high school ex in his hometown bar, “The Union” starts on Roxanne. It begins with a kind of “Mission: Impossible”-style extraction gone wrong, in Trieste, Italy, where most of her team ends up dead. She decides that they need some working class grit to reboot.

The idea for the movie came from Stephen Levinson, Wahlberg’s longtime business partner, who together helped bring another middle-of-the-road Netflix action-comedy to life in “Spenser Confidential.” It's directed very basically by Julian Farino, a journeyman who helmed many episodes of “Entourage,” and written by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. And there is a sort of charming fantasy about the notion that anyone could be a moderately successful international spy given the opportunity and a few weeks of training. In the movies, women get to find out they’re secret royalty and men get to find out they’re secretly great spies.

But “The Union” never quite hits its stride tonally. It’s not silly enough to be a comedy, though I think that’s what it would prefer to be. J.K. Simmons is given too little to work with as the head of this secret agency, which also employs underwritten characters played by Jackie Earle Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Alice Lee. One of the more moderately successful running jokes is that Mike’s undercover character is from Boston (get it?). A hulking English henchman even has a heart-to-heart with him about “Good Will Hunting.”

Berry and Wahlberg are fine together, with an easy rapport, but zero chemistry. This would not be problem if the movie wasn’t also trying to be a will-they-won’t-they romance between a woman who forgot her roots and a guy who needs to. I never quite bought into the idea that either of them are actually still thinking about their high school relationship and what went wrong. There’s been a lot of life in the interim to dwell on decisions you made at 17. Not everyone can be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or even Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton – but maybe in this case the story should have changed to serve its actors better.

That's a nitpick for something with much larger problems. And ultimately “The Union” suffers the fate of many high-priced streaming movies before it: There’s just not enough there — action, comedy, romance, art — to demand (or, rather, earn) your full attention.