Hamstrung by the same issues that plague most of these Netflix movies, Trigger Warning can't live up to its evocative title.
Listen at the podcast providers of your choice.
Action movies are graded on a curve. In a standard drama, a cheesy one-liner before shooting an enemy would completely break the mood or undercut an otherwise serious moment. But in the action genre, it's part of the fun. That inherent absurdity is why you can see a bunch of action movies with middling or bad reviews that are beloved by fans of the genre. Oh the dialogue was bad? Sorry, I was too busy watching our hero machine gun 100 dudes to death without taking a scratch. The plot isn't realistic? I see your plot and raise you Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a cliff. It means that if an action movie does gets bad reviews without any level of enthusiasm from genre fans, something clearly went wrong. Which brings me to Trigger Warning, a Netflix exclusive starring Jessica Alba that on paper should work, but in reality plays more like big-budget TV movie.
The Setup
Alba plays Parker Calvo, an active Special Forces commando who gets troubling news from her hometown. That her father has been killed in a mining accident. But Parker does some digging she quickly discovers that the alleged accident wasn't an accident and may have ties to a local politician looking to fund his campaign by unsavory means.
Trigger Warning falls nicely into a sub-genre of action movie-making I've dubbed Netflix star-vehicle mediocrity. For the last 3-4 years Netflix has been making mid to big budget money to make action vehicles for older Hollywood stars. The alleged appeal of these movies is to take stars that were probably bigger box-office pulls by themselves in the 2000s and give them a somewhat competent action-comedy or action-thriller flick to bounce around in for 100-120 minutes. This includes movies like The Union starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, Back in Action starring Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz and The Mother starring Jennifer Lopez.
Theoretically this is a movement I should love. It's hard to get semi-original action movies made nowadays by the big studios and stars like Berry and Foxx still have plenty left in the tank if given the chance. So let's have some fun.
The problem is how much these movies run together in look, feel, and faults. They all feel like a version of the same movie that Netflix is content to make to justify their most recent price hike. And unfortunately for Trigger Warning this is the most recent one I've seen so it's in line to get chewed out for the group's mistakes.
But before we get to that, let's get to what this movie does right.
Jessica Alba and Some Crunchy Action Beats
As much as the movie around her needs substantial work, this is Jessica Alba's best on screen performance since Machete. Something so many failed action heroes fail to do is to capture a truly that unflappable human bulldozer aspect that action heroes have to embody and Alba has always been great at this. So even if the dialogue she's being given is bad in bad way, not bad in a fun way, the attitude shines through. This is also sold really well by her commitment to the film's action beats which vary from hard-edged military tactical action to the much more fun, blade-wielding bad-ass sequences or improvised weapon beats. The rest...oooh boy the rest.
This Could've Worked
The baseline premise for this movie is basically a Jack Reacher premise. Highly competent bad ass comes home to a dead relative, decides to do some digging and uncovers a giant conspiracy that will need to be addressed with brute force.
That's fine by itself.
And, generally speaking, I like the outline of the conspiracy which involves a local right-wing politician hawking weapons to fund his campaign. That's not bad either.
So what's the problem?
Problem #1: Man This Dialogue
This is the biggest problem with the majority of these Netflix action flicks. The dialogue is atrocious. It all sounds like a collection of action movie cliches that our competent actors are having to convincingly deliver. But they can't because having Jessica Alba telling someone they "punch like a bitch" barely would've worked in 2002, let alone today. Which in turn, undercuts Alba's bad-ass bonafides, because she sounds like a dork play-acting bad-ass even as she takes down three men twice her size.
Likewise, every conversation in this movie has the same exact trajectory. Alba enters the conversation being either too forward or too aloof about something. The person next to her, usually a guy, pushes back. She pushes again. They capitulate or ask her to leave. Alba delivers a dig and does the thing she was already planning on doing.
As dumb half the lines in Commando are, the cheesy post-kill lines from Arnold do serve a purpose. They reinforce the movie's tone, which is that of a big dumb silly action movie that is never meant to be taken seriously. Trigger Warning has the same level of line and delivers them with a straight face.
Problem #2: Can We Get A Different Kind of Action Please
I think it's time to sit a bunch of directors down and get them to watch action movies that aren't John Wick or, at the very least, get them to lean into that franchise's excesses.
Since that franchise's success, the lion's share of mainstream American action movies have focused on grounded, tactical action with everyone fighting and shooting guns exactly how they would be used in an actual fight (as far as most people know).
This means a lot of closed-quarters grapple fighting where almost no one is throwing haymakers, there's a ton more cover-fire versus spray and pray takedowns of a gaggle of goons, and no one's walking away from explosions anymore (a sad time we live in indeed).
And as much as I like convincing stunt work, I'll be the first to achknowledge that choice excess is what makes effective tactical action a lot more fun. In the aforementioned Jack Reacher show Reacher the fight choreographers love to 3-4 hits that would absolutely not work or defy physics per fight scene just to reinforce what a brick shithouse our hero is. You can still include pitched battles between even matched fighters, but having at least one or two "fuck you I'm the hero" moves is always appreciated in this genre.
Problem #3 (Spoilers Ahead): What The Hell is This Movie Saying?
I'll say this much. I appreciate how bold on of this movie's biggest turns is...in theory. What we come to find out is that Jessica Alba's father stumbled across a criminal conspiracy which involved an aspiring Congressman and his son selling weapons to violent white supremacists to support their campaign. Weapons that they've stolen from a military depot.
Well of course this is bad, also a not so subtle commentary on how right-wing shitheads like this would-be Congressman and the local police implicitly or actively throw their support behind white supremacist and militia groups.
Unfortunately, the movie's treatment of all of these groups (aka politicians, local police and military members) as separate from the white supremacists undercuts its message.
Which is doubly wild because Jessica Alba has starred in a movie that got this right: Machete. Also ultraviolent and silly as Machete is, the thing it gets right is by completely removing the line between the politicians who enable violent vigilantes and the vigilantes themselves. Hence why Robert DeNiro's Congressman is filmed taking shots at people trying to cross the border.
Here everyone seems really surprised that these hardened criminals would murder innocent people or try to use their recently acquired military grade RPGs on anything but target shooting.
And I think I know how this happened: Alba's character is still in the military.
I don't know exactly how much U.S. military support this movie got, if any, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. What is clear is that the U.S. military, that somehow allowed a group to tunnel into a weapons depot and didn't notice when a bunch of explosive weapons got taken, is not involved in this conspiracy. No one here screwed up. This is a few bad actors.
Which, if you know anything about issues in the U.S. military is giving them an awful lot of credit.
Top military brass have rung the alarm bell many times about rise of the white supremacists in their ranks which would make some kind of military involvement in this conspiracy not only realistic, but expected.
But because Alba's character is still serving that military, it means she can't attack it.
I know I've circled back to this charcter twice now, but this is again why Jack Reacher is so effective. Jack Reacher is a man of unflappable morals first and openly defies military order and convention to reinforce those morals.
Which makes a character like Alba's feel defanged. Because her entire fight could be a scathing indictment of all the systems that either implicitly or explicitly endanger and exploit non-White people for the sake of "safety," and instead it hems closer to "we've got a few bad apples."
The Verdict: Mediocre
Hamstrung by the same issues that plague most of these Netflix movies, Trigger Warning can't live up to its evocative title.
No comments:
Post a Comment