I don’t want to go as far as to suggest that I’m suffering from negative reinforcement, but I’m starting to treat the news of any upcoming female-led action movie debuting on Netflix the same way I treated word of another direct-to-streaming Steven Seagal. However, before you worry that you’ve clicked on this link only to stumble into yet another foamy-mouthed, misogynistic rant – can I please assure you that I truly want female-led action flicks to succeed, it’s just Nexflix blatantly isn’t the company to make it happen.
Thanks to their dedication of providing content over art, the last few years has seen the streaming colossus bang out film after film that, at best, is stupid and at worse just utterly sucks; with stars such as Jennifer Lopez, Charlize Theron and Gal Gadot appearing in shockingly forgettable thrillers that genuinely prove that these women can capably throw a punch at the expense of being even remotely memorable.
Well, now it’s Jessica Alba’s turn – but can Trigger Warning manage to break the Netflix/ female/action movie curse?
Parker is a highly trained special operative in the U.S. military who, on the way home from her latest mission gets word that her father has been killed in a collapsing mine – however, before you have images of him toiling underground like a prospector in the old West, dear departed dad had his man cabral located in an actual cave located next to the bar he owns. However, upon returning to the town of Creation, Parker is greeted by her old flame and town sheriff, Jesse, who suggests that her father may have killed himself thanks to a rapidly ailing memory, but our heroine has a tough time believing that her father would kill himself with a grenade simply because he’s gone a bit scatty in his later years.
Digging even deeper, Parker soon starts to suspect that Jesse’s no-good brother, Elvis, might be involved as she spots him showing off with some serious military ordinance for shits and Giggles and while gun control in America is admittedly iffy, a shit-eating hick withba rocket launcher isn’t something you tend to see everyday. Anyway, whatever the hell is going on, it leads back to Jesse and Elvis’ father, Ezekiel Swann, a bigoted senator who needs funds for his latest campaign and has gotten into the business of arms dealing to ensure that cash flow.
Suddenly finding that her mission to find the truth has switched from a revenge mission to a fight for survival, Parker has to use every inch of her skill – plus utilise her handiness with a knife – in order to clean up her home town and avenge her father.
While Netflix’s business plan is fiendishly sound when it comes to supplying an endless supply of content for people at a loss for something to watch while they scroll through their phone, it truly has me a little worried about how much damage this string of astoundingly bland action flicks does to the action genre as a whole, regardless of what gender the lead actor is. As we’re currently in the middle of a year where action movies are taking something of a worrying battering at the box office and if the future is a clutch of films as inherently dull as what we have here.
Now while dumping the future of an entire genre on the shoulders of Jessica Alba and Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya seems a little harsh, if this string of stinkers continues, who knows where it will end.
The plot – which fancies itself as part murder mystery, part action-packed revenge – meanders at a strange pace and curiously seems to be styling itself on a mix between Walking Tall and Road House, and yet forgets to be even remotely as fun as either. In fact, at times, it really does feel like the script has been at least partially created by a writer sneakily checking over their shoulder before stabbing the A.I. button in order to clock off early. In fact, this film is so derivative, you could conceivably CGI a 90s era Steven Segal or Jean Claude Van Damme over Alba and you wouldn’t even notice the difference. To play devil’s advocate slightly, it’s not like the actress isn’t a veteran of genre filmmaking with a couple of Fantastic Four movies, some Robert Rodriguez roles and the bikini-tastic Into The Blue under her belt, but the rather basic role of Parker doesn’t really give her much to play with and what it does give her, she kind of just sleepwalks it in thanks to the fact that all of Parker’s most memorable attributes are usually found in her childhood flashbacks. While her father’s life lessons may seem a bit of a parenting red flag (“Never carry a knife without sharpening it.” may not be of the same calibre as “Don’t run with scissors” or “Look before you leap” but it certainly pays off here). But again, this is hardly a capital crime in the land of action movies as this is a genre where action literally speaks louder than words and with the production company that made John Wick, Thunder Road, in the mix, surely this is where Trigger Warning finally shows its quality.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to discern whether Alba proves to be a natural at the ol’ John Wick brawl ‘n shoot as Surya stages most of Trigger Warning’s fight scenes in a murky gloom for reasons I can’t quite figure out. Is it to aid the fight choreography, is it to mask the damage Parker’s knives do in order to help with the rating, or some other confounding reason? Well, whatever it is, it renders the action scenes as monotonous as the rest of the film and once again Netflix shits the bed when they could genuinely be on the cutting edge of providing middle-aged actresses a second life as grizzled battle veterans – well, as grizzled as Jessica Alba can look, anyway.
Everyone else goes about their business as they should – Anthony Michael Hall’s bigoted senator is suitably dickish – but everything moves at such a morose speed that I couldn’t stop my mind wandering off and fixating on random things, presumably to protect itself. For example, there’s absolutely no reason to have named this movie Trigger Warning unless it’s trying to warn people who are triggered by boring thrillers. I mean there are arms dealer involved, sure; and arms dealers are known to peddle wares that typ5have triggers on them – but I don’t think that’s it either…
See? See how easy it was to just lose the thread of this movie entirely? That’s not the sort of energy an action film – even one shot disturbingly like a TV movie – should hope to cultivate and if the world of female-led action thrillers is going to get the respect it deserves, it needs to get its act together. Quick smart.
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