Continuing their movie towards providing premium content via
the streaming as an increasingly popular alternative content delivery system,
“Triple Frontier” serves to bolster their library of cinematic originals with a
solid, diverting, and mildly ambitious heist movie that entertains even if its reach
ultimately exceeds its grasp.
Following a group of 5 former soldiers forced into doing
private military work, the movie opens discussing the toll on the body, mind,
and soul of an individual who’s hired to kill for a living and the problems
they all must face when they’re thrown back into the challenges of civilian
lifestyle with an inadequate standard of resources to cope with the changes
they’ve seen in service.
While the film features a number of moments carried well by
the cast in which these soldiers have to grapple with the decision to return to
their work in an unabashedly illegal capacity in ways most films featuring
mercenaries never touch on, it never quite feels like the envelope is pushed on
their ethically questionable activities as far as it should.
Despite the occasionally touching on some territory that
makes this band of soldiers genuinely human, the aspects of grey morality surrounding
the use of military skills in legally dubious entrepreneurial capacities
because their employers seem to have little regard for them if they’re not
dying or killing in a field ultimately become more of a spice that permeates
pockets of an action movie that has some noticeable unevenness to its
narrative.
Those shortcomings within the written material aside
however, “Triple Frontier” is truly made by its direction.
J.C. Chandor of “All is Lost” and “A Most Violent Year” fame
is real maestro when it comes to constructing immersive and atmospheric
narratives through scenery and cast performances and it’s here that the movie
excels with flying colors.
Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Oscar Isaac,
and Pedro Pascal have all long proven to carry star weight individually but
their individual talents not only help wonders in bringing to life characters
that feel staggeringly real but their chemistry is so magnificent I almost feel
as though you could mine a whole television series worth of content were you to
explore their history as comrades in service based solely on events that are
only hinted to have happened in interactions.
They each form a solid foundation of a dynamic group and I
quite frankly found their camaraderie more compelling than the 3 movies and 5
years sunken into making “The Expendables” franchise a thing that exists.
Even when you don’t like them you can’t help but be
fascinated by them as they think on their feet to navigate their way through a
heist that, in a twist of formula, is more or less executed by the half way
point, leaving the remainder of the movie to cover the difficulties of
international extraction and debriefing, along with the hitches that can hit at
each step.
What results is a cool hodgepodge of filmmaking genres
consisting of part heist story, war narrative, and part survival movie as the
journey to their extraction point with their loot in a movie that almost seems
to be juggling too many balls but masterfully maintains streamlined components
to keep from becoming unwieldy.
The movie has to go through a lot of different modes but it
manages to do it all organically and keep things moving at a solid pace.
“Triple Frontier” doesn’t actualize all of the potential in
some of its more cerebral themes but manages to at least keep them afloat in a
fun, tense, and compelling character driven action thriller that more or less
satisfyingly nails every note it had to hit.
7 Cartel Stashes out of 10
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