You had to grab every single dollar you could get your hands on, didn't you?

Triple Frontier

(2019)

(SPOILERS) Triple Frontier must have seemed like a no-brainer for Netflix, even by their standards of indiscriminately greenlighting projects whenever anyone who can’t get a job at a proper studio asks. It had, after all, been a hot property – nearly a decade ago now – with Kathryn Bigelow attached as director (she retains a producing credit) and subsequently JC Chandor, who has seen it through to completion. Netflix may not have attracted quite the same level of prospective stars – Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Tom Hardy and Channing Tatum were all involved at various points – but as ever, they haven’t stinted on the production. To what end, though? Well, Bigelow’s involvement is a reliable indicator; this is a movie about very male men doing very masculine things and suffering stoically for it.

I’ve liked what I’ve seen of Chandor’s previous work (Margin Call and A Most Violent Year), even if I’d be hard-pressed to reach an opinion on what sort of filmmaker he is (a competent one, I guess), and he’s co-credited on the screenplay with the project’s originator Mark Boal, but there’s something faintly underwhelming about every aspect of Triple Frontier, even granted the evident polish of the production. Boal, a former journalist, is best known for his studies of the military machine (In the Valley of Elah, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), ones which leave one with a sense that he’s overly respectful of the edifice while being sure to pluck plaudits for threading in nominal critiques (Elah is by some distance the best of the three, and I wonder how much of that wasn’t Paul Haggis’ input).

So it is here. There have been references to Triple Frontier operating along the lines of Three Kings meets The Treasure of the Sierre Madre, but there’s none of the former’s irreverence or the latter’s escalating insanity and paranoia to exert a hold on the viewer. Indeed, this is fairly standard-issue “mercenaries on a mission” fare, even extending to the opportunity to both do something noble (topple Colombian drug lord Lorea) and slightly less so (steal his loot into the bargain, but hey, the authorities there are hopelessly corrupt, so if you want to get the job done and there’s a little extra loot involved, to the tune of $250m, that’s all gravy).

In his first scene, Charlie Hunnam’s motivational speaker is giving troops a lecture about “the price of being a warrior”, evidence enough of how this will unfold tonally: dour veterans’ inability to adjust to civilian life, wracked with guilt over misdeeds done, and looking forward to getting back into the stylishly rendered, explosive action as a cathartic recourse (“We’re a dying breed. We were warriors”).

This rather hollow reading is further emphasised by the casting, a quintet of pampered Hollywood types donning their best hard-man war faces. Oscar Isaac, who worked previously with Chandor on A Most Violent Year, plays Pope, the instigator of the mission. He’s fine, but I do wonder where Isaac’s career is heading, in the same way that Andy Garcia started out with so much promise and then just became “fine”, and we forgot all the “next Pacino” talk. Pedro Pascal barely registers, while Garret Hedlund (as Hunnam’s brother) stands out only for looking more like a stoned surfer than a battle-weary vet (we’re also asked to believe he’s taken up a career as a mixed marital artist, so there are several serious stretches there).

Hunnam’s the conscience of the group, at least to an extent, as the quintet seem to assume positions according to the dictates of the scene, not having been fleshed out in sufficiently differentiated fashion at the outset. Beefy Batfleck has the most to chew on, in theory, as the real estate salesman unleashed in batty Bogart fashion when he gets a whiff of the loot, but sadly, one gets the impression this element was rather reined in somewhere along the way. He gets greedy, sure, but his perfectionist planner is quicky regretful for how his actions lead to their coming unstuck (“I killed those people” he professes, after a village massacre. “No you didn’t. We all did” comes back surfer martial artist dude, who later recklessly burns a load of money, KLF style, but with the excuse of wanting to keep warm. A donkey also goes over a cliff, though not as a result of mixed martial arts action, which is more affecting than any human casualties).

Indeed, there’s a sense of pulled punches throughout, that the material might have been on course for more all-out existential crisis territory, pitting former colleague against former colleague amidst the unforgiving elements. The sort of thing where Liam Neeson has to square off against a pack of hungry wolves after his fellow survivors are whittled down. Instead, it’s only Batfleck who comes a cropper, and in the last scene, helpful Hunnam even presents Isaac with the co-ordinates of the ravine they dropped their loot down (to be revisited when and if Netflix asks for Quadruple Frontier). The only discernible price paid is nobly giving up their shares of the meagre sum they escaped with to Batfleck’s family trust fund. Boam and Chandor make vague gestures towards the paraphernalia of modern warfare and irrevocably damaged psyches, but so glibly that most of the proceedings wouldn’t look out of place in a forty-year-old Christopher Walken movie made from a Frederick Forsyth novel.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog