Director – Kevin Downes, Screenplay – Fletcher Grayson & Chipper Lowell, Story – Kevin Downes, Fletcher Grayson & David [A.R.] White, Producers – Bobby Downes, Kevin Downes, Cosimo Michael Occhipinti & David [A.R.] White, Photography – Philip Hurn, Music – Marc Fantini & Steffan Fantini, Special Effects – Danny Copen, Production Design – Laird Pulver. Production Company – Signal Hill Pictures.
Cast
Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Tom Newman), David [A.R.] White (Brody Sutton), Kevin Downes (Jerry Willis), Stephen Baldwin (Luke), Amy Moon (Jessica Newman), Jason Brock (CPF Officer), Troy Winbush (Lewis), Eric Roberts (Dallas), Elena Lyons (Rahab), Cosimo Michael (Elijah Cohen), Coleman Luck (Charles)
Plot
In the future, people have agreed to accept an implant on the hand that allows access to The Community where their actions are guided by The Leader who claims to be a god. Some elect not to accept the implant and live outside the system. Former police detective Tom Newman is one of these who have refused and operates as a smuggler on the black market. He is now arrested by his estranged wife Jessica, who has received the implant and become one of The Community’s security enforcers. Tom is offered the opportunity to avoid execution by undertaking a mission – of infiltrating a group of Christians and assassinating their leader Elijah Cohen. Tom is placed in jail, sharing a cell with Brody Sutton and Jerry Willis who have both been arrested as high-end car thieves. There, as Tom sets out to fulfil his mission and infiltrate the network of Christians, fellow prisoner Luke has an unusual effect on them by preaching the Christian Gospel.
Christian Cinema has become a growing niche market of its own since the late 1990s. Amid this there have been a mini-genre of films that depict the Biblical end of the world, The Rapture, the coming of the Anti-Christ. These include the likes of Raging Angels (1994), The Omega Code (1999), Gone (2003), Revelation Road: The Beginning of the End (2013) and sequels and Final: The Rapture (2015), while this mini-genre has been plumbed with regularity by the Lalonde Brothers and their Cloud Ten Pictures in their tetraology Armageddon (1998), Revelation (1999), Tribulation (2000) and Judgment (2001), and their adaptations of Left Behind (2000) and sequels, along with the big-budget remake Left Behind (2014). (For a more detailed overview of the genre see Films About Biblical End Times Prophecies).
Six: The Mark Unleashed is directed and produced by Kevin Downes, who also plays the role of the Jerry, one of the car thieves who becomes converted through the course of the film. Within this Christian Cinema niche, Downes had previously produced and written the End Times film The Moment After (1999) and produced the hilariously bad Time Changer (2002). Subsequent to this, Downes produced a bunch of other Christian films including The Visitation (2006), The Lost Medallion: The Adventures of Billy Stone (2013), The Jesus Music (2021) and Jesus Revolution (2023), among others. He also makes acting appearances in most of these. He has only directed one other film with Amazing Love (2012).
With Six: The Mark Unleashed, Kevin Downes wants to make some kind of film about The Biblical End Times – in specific the period when the Antichrist takes over and the Mark of the Beast must be worn by all (it is usually said to be on the forehead but here becomes a chip placed on the wrist). This becomes a leaping off point where Downes and co then make a Christian Dystopia film of sorts.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan undergoes torture
The main confusion of the film is that it is not exactly clear what the implant does – the film is vague about how it seems to coerce people to live by a unified code. Mostly wearing the implant is defined in terms of just being a vague dystopian threat where everyone is forced to conform to something that is the antithesis of what the Christians believe and there is authoritarian crackdown on those who do not accept it.
The biggest surprise about Six: The Mark Unleashed is its starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, several years before he found fame as Negan on tv’s The Walking Dead (2010-22). I don’t know if Morgan was cast because of his personal beliefs or was just an unknown actor taking any job he could get. You get some impression that Morgan is not taking the show too seriously as in the scenes where he is tortured while delivering asides like: “Oh and let’s not forget the sound of cracking bones” or is asked “Is there something that you wish to confess?” and replies “I wish to confess that you’re a complete nutcase.” The other bizarre performance present is Stephen Baldwin, younger brother of Alec, as a painedly earnest fellow prisoner who spouts Bible verses and lives in the serene otherworldly certainty of his faith coming to deliver them.
Six: The Mark Unleashed lays on the preaching, quoting Bible verses and even blatantly telling people they are going to Hell. The dystopian angle and prison setting is semi-interesting – it is at least something different for one of these films – but eventually only trades in clichés. The film does however arrive at a surprisingly downbeat ending.
