Movie Review – Trigger Warning
Principal Cast : Jessica Alba, Mark Webber, Tone Bell, Jake Weary, Gabriel Basso, Anthony Michael Hall, Kaiwi Lyman, Hari Dhillon, Alejandro De Hoyos.
Synopsis: A special forces commando returns to her hometown after her father’s sudden death, only to run afoul of a violent gang when she starts asking questions.
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Obnoxiously dull, Jessica Alba’s blood and bullets revenge thriller Trigger Warning smashes together every possible genre cliché in its efforts to ignite the screen with… inexplicably, nothing. The film’s generic plot, one-dimensional characters and Alba’s hilariously idiotic reluctant heroine archetype hamstring what had potential to be a cheap post-modern John Wick knock-0ff and turn it into a dumpster fire of half-baked action. This can’t even muster the energy to be so-bad-it’s-good awful, the kind of pulp B-grade fodder Chuck Norris might have shat out in the 80’s were he not so fucking tough. Alba ain’t Norris, and it’s not even close; Trigger Warning feels less triggering to action junkies than it is clumsily pieced together from the remnants of other, far more superior movies that have preceded it.
Alba plays one of the most ineffective special forces solders ever put to screen, in Parker, who returns to her hometown from the battlefield following the sudden death of her father (Alejandro De Hoyos, in flashback form). Upon her arrival, she immediately rekindles a relationship with ex-boyfriend (and now town sheriff) Jesse (Mark Webber), while raising the ire of local arms dealer (and Jesse’s kid brother), Elvis (Jake Weary), who is stealing ordinance from a nearby military base and using it to make money from eager domestic terrorists and the black market. When it turns out Parker’s father may have actually been murdered, the soldier, alongside special ops hacker Spider (Tone Bell) and stoner best friend Mike (Gabriel Basso) must fight to take back what she’s lost, no matter who she has to kill.
Trigger Warning is laughably bad. I mean, irredeemably awful, one of the more ineptly conceived and executed action thrillers of the year, lacking a basic understanding of pacing, what constitutes thrills, and the ability to generate excitement through action, of which the film gamely tries to accomplish but never quite succeeds. The film runs aground firstly thanks to a generic, formulaic genre plot: a hero returns to a former hometown (proving that you really can’t go back) and runs into trouble with former friends and enemies, and must thwart some plan by a local hustler – in this instance Anthony Michael Hall’s dastardly local state senator character, Ezekiel, who happens to be the father of both the town’s sheriff and the town’s local idiot-slash-petty-criminal. As you might expect, the hero has backup in the form of her former friend, as well as an off-base military expert who happens to “owe her a few things”. There’s honestly not a single aspect of this film you haven’t seen before, from films as diverse as The Wraith, Footloose, and even Roadhouse to some degree. It’s all a swollen pastiche of clichés, this film parlaying the still supreme physique of Jessica Alba into a sweaty, if incomprehensibly dumb special forces solder, intent on tearing down the house of cards around town.
I say incomprehensively dumb because for all her character’s supposed smarts in both tactical and physical training, Parker is redoubtably an imbecile when faced with plot contrivances forcing her to make the wrong decisions. She almost trips over herself as she makes poor choice after poor choice, not to mention the fact that her fighting skills and skillset vacillates between “shoot the balls off a blowfly at a hundred yards” to “can’t work out which way up to hold a knife” depending on what the plot calls for. She’s both incredibly strong and interminably weak, bested often by the less-skilled local townsfolk she comes into brawl-contact with, and gaining an upper hand either through sheer dumb luck or handy just-offscreen assistance. The film’s schizophrenic development of Parker as a character frustrated the hell out of me – had Alba been able to play it her own way definitively, as either a Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 way (which would have been super cool) or a John Wick assassin type (even cooler), rather than the ineffective, emotionally uneven Parker we get here, I think Trigger Warning could have been something of a minor classic a la Atomic Blonde. Sadly, with a script as dull as this, thanks to a trio of credited names including A History of Violence writer Josh Olson, Trigger Warning is a an asinine desert-scape sojourn into Alba’s body taking as much punishment as is humanly possible.
There’s an argument that even a weak hero can be propped up by a strong villain, although Indonesian director Mouly Surya (Fiksi) wastes the talents of the potential strongman in Anthony Michael Hall with lazy antagonist plotting and a hairbrained MacGuffin. One of the characters is tunnelling into, and stealing from, a US military base and nobody seems to have noticed? And the dude doing the thievery is a local hick douchcanoe with the intellect of a gnat? I mean… really? Halls’ Senator character is identifiably Bad Guy material from the jump, as is his arrogantly annoying son Elvis – played by a terrific Jake Weary (It Chapter Two) – but the film never bothers to really give us any motive to the actions they take, at least not one that works well enough to matter, and this ineffectiveness really hamstrings the emergent frisson between Parker and her enemies. You could see what the filmmakers were trying to achieve, but they lacked a competent director to get there.
Mouly Surya simply isn’t up to the challenge. Trigger Warning needed some punch, some zest or energy within its dumb plot and rote characters to mitigate audience boredom. In terms of visual panache there’s glimpses of an eye for framing but you can tell only the stunt coordinator and the editing team have salvaged as much as they could from this miasma. Inert and meaningless action sequences drop along periodically, a couple are borderline unwatchable for their hilarious ineptness, while little things like logic and the laws of physics seem to take a back seat to narrative expediency when the moment calls for it. The pacing of the film is all over the place, from the woefully befuddling cold open to the meandering township dynamic at work as Parker returns home – this is a film that feels like a modern Clint Eastwood Western traced over an action movie, without much care, and with a large, unsubtle paintbrush. When the action comes its slick and sparsely shot, often obfuscated by Alba’s stuntwoman trying her best not to get in the way as the actress makes a good show of looking pained and injured throughout, and the film’s few VFX are quite noticeable, if not egregious. This is a film director unsure of the genre in which she’s working, and incapable of delivering even the most routine levels of excitement from one of the dumbest screenplays to come along in quite a while.
Trigger Warning is a boring, poorly written mess. Fans of Jessica Alba will be thoroughly disappointed, the actress wholly wasted in this nonsensical drivel that serves as the worst possible showcase for her attempt to enter the modern action lexicon. What few decent action beats there are, are further undercut by the fact that Alba lacks the gravitas to pull of the role – she ain’t no Charlize Theron, Zoe Saldana or Milla Jovovich, that’s for sure – and is saddled with a character so mindlessly dull and inconsequential it infuriated me. I’m rarely infuriated by a film, unless it’s a documentary. Trigger Warning should come with its own trigger warning about how outraged you’ll be having sat through it. Skip this one.
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