By Emery Snyder @leeroy711
Director: J.C. Chandor
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro
Pascal & Garret Hedlund
Netflix Original – March 13, 2019
A group five of disaffected and financially stressed special
ops adrenaline junkies all suffering from varying levels of PTSD get together
to pull the ever-fated “one last job.” The plan is to break into the fortress
of a ruthless Colombian cartel kingpin and steal his $75 million, then smuggle
it out of the country and retire. All goes exactly according to plan, the bad
guys all perish, and the soldiers spend the rest of their days sipping rum
drinks on some beach without an extradition treaty…. That would be a pretty
lousy movie.
The film was co-produced by Kathryne Bigelow and Mark Boal and
it was co-written by Boal and Chandor. As expected from a Boal screenplay, the
military procedural aspect is the film’s highlight. The stakes are heightened by
situation only while characters remain largely stoic and wooden. We are meant
to extrapolate the men’s emotions strictly from their backstories, never from
their faces. I’m not degrading the film because of this. This type of
indifference has its place. And Boal spent time as an embedded reporter in the
earlier years after the invasion of Iraq, so I trust that his writing draws
from the soldiers he witnessed in combat. Suppression of emotion is seen as a
necessary survival tactic here.
So much of how successful a movie like this is to me will
always depend on how well the scenes are shot. This film boasts several very
well composed shootouts. The spaces are beautifully scoped in 2:11:1 ratio,
giving the audience a clear perspective of the action presented. This is
something that I always tend to mention because it is something that is so
often done poorly. But here, I was glad to be able to easily follow along with
each set piece, always having a good sense of where the threat was coming from
and where our protagonists were moving towards. Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov has
already made a name for himself in action cinema with films like END OF WATCH (’12)
and THE WALL (’17) and I see his work continuing to improve.
I was also pleased to find that this, unlike many similar
films, seemed to have an acute awareness of the moral ambiguity of what these
men were up to. Although the characters were easily able to overcome their individual
crises of conscience, the film itself keeps its thumb down on them as they
struggle to keep themselves and each other convinced that what they are doing
is righteous or even justified. It doesn’t take much to draw the parallels
between their actions and the duplicitous nature of our own government’s involvement
in Latin America over the past century. This is a moral tale more than anything.
The fruits of ill-gotten gains are heavy, and fraught with peril. The money
they steal becomes the reason they have such a hard time escaping the region.
It weighs on them, both physically and metaphorically.
Unfortunately, this film suffers from some strange pacing
issues. I think this is what separates it from better works. The scene from the
trailer, that you would expect to be the climax, happens about thirty minutes
in. Nothing afterwards manages to live up to the promise of the first act. It
actually feels like the stakes dwindle the longer you watch, as does your
overall interest. And this is a problem when your running time is over two
hours.
In summary, TRIPLE FRONTIER is a well-made and better than
average action flick that refreshingly acknowledges the faults of its own heroes.
But fall well short of greatness in its overall delivery.
Emery’s Rating
3.25 out of 5 Stars
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