Heist films tend to mostly be either unfeasibly well oiled machines of slick, technical expertise or zippy quirk-fests that see an ensemble banter just as much as steal – however, in 2016, John Hillcoat opted to go a different route with his gritty crime flick, Triple 9. Yes, he could have gone the way of Heat and been devestatingly cool, or even had a little fun in an Ocean’s 13 kind of way – but Hillcoat isn’t exactly known for being cool or funny; Hillcoat deals in pain an misery.
Thus we have a movie about bad people doing bad things in order to make their lives oh so slightly better as the film grabs us by the scruff of the neck and shoves our face into one of the more unpalatable areas of Atlanta where criminals are vicious scumbags and the cops, thanks to the drugs or greed that flow through their veins, makes them even more amoral than the people they’re chasing. Morality is about to take a holiday here, people, so your ethics might want to take a shower.
A professional crew of trained criminals swoop down upon a bank wearing ski masks and clutching some piss-your-pants ordinance and hold the place up in order grab a single item from a secure lockbox. However, while this team of five act like a well oiled machine to get in and out, one of their number is careless enough to go off mission and grab a random bundle of money as they leave which turns out to be one of those decoy packages that belches red smoke as the team attempt to make their getaway. But while their job didn’t exactly go to plan, the quintet still manage to escape and during the aggressive finger pointing that follows, we find out a rather shocking fact about this group – two of them are cops, and not undercover ones, either.
One is the charismatic Detective Marcus Belmont and the other is the far colder Franco Rodriguez and somehow, somewhere down the line, they joined forces with ex-Navy SEALs Michael Atwood, Russel Welch and Russel’s drugged up brother, former cop, Gabe to form the gang we’ve just seen in action. However, the reason their last heist was for a lockbox and not bags full of cash is that Michael has got himself in a spot of bother with the calculating wife of an imprisoned Jewish-Russian Mafia boss as he has a young child with her sister. In the stolen lockbox was evidence that could overturn the bosses conviction, but instead of pay Michael the money he’s earned, the callous wife withholding payment until the completion of a second job that would require them to raid an office of the Department Of Homeland Security to steal yet more data.
In a bind and presented a job that seems to be next to impossible, Michael puts it to his crew that they have to find a way to pull of this impossible task – however, when Marcus and Franco suggests having a fellow police officer murdered in order to draw all the local police to the call (the triple 9 of the title), they try to work out who the unlucky officer will be. Step forward the recently transferred Chris Allen – but will the conscience of those involved allow them to go through with it?
Leave it to John Hillcoat to take the heist genre and add layers of grim subterfuge and a tone of bleakness that feels like a choking cloud of mustard gas in the lungs. While the director’s previous offerings included superlative Aussie western The Proposition and the despair powered extravaganza that is The Road, I was still oddly unprepared about how down and dirty Triple 9 was going to be. Easily matching the urban squalor, sweaty danger and morals free attitude of the likes of Training Day or Narc, we follow a string of men on both sides of the law whose motives are literally all over the place. This leads to different men being affected in different ways by guilt and responsibility and this examination of how guilt preys on different people seems to be what Hillcoat intends Triple 9 to really be about. However, while he painstakingly conjures up an appropriately crime ridden Atlantian hell hole for our players to writhe through and provides a couple of hard bitten heists to mix things up, there weirdly is something of a disconnect when it comes to the characters.
It’s weird mostly because Triple 9 has something of an impressively stacked cast who all do good work, but there’s a feeling that the film could really have used an extra twenty minutes or so to really ground these characters more than being a clutch of tough-talking clichés. It’s also slightly harmful that in an attempt to fully embrace the assemble aesthetic, Hillcoat refuses you to give you a solid lead to follow which helps immensely when it comes to delivering an unpredictable experience, but it also leaves you feeling unconnected to any of the people involved.
Jostling for position as something even vaguely approaching the main character is Chiwetel Ejiofor’s professional Michael who is caught up in the claws of Kate Winslet’s mobster monster in a blow out hairdo thanks to the hold she has over his son. Elsewhere we have Casey Affleck’s sullen honest cop who unknowingly becomes the entire lynch pin to the plan when he is selected to be the poor bastard to be subject of the all important “officer down” and on top of that, we also have Woody Harrelson as his drug consuming, prostitute visiting, haunted, overprotective uncle who is also on the force. Even Anthony Mackie’s corrupt detective has a fair crack of being the lead as he soon finds that his many brutal choices as starting to weigh on him, but the result is that all these different conflicting, entwined threads end up cancelling each other out and worse yet, sometimes even dilute the power of some of the other stories.
Still, even if the movie can’t seem to donate enough time to each character to make their stories resonate more than just on the surface level, the sheer talent of of the cast involved and Hillcoat’s dedication to making Atlanta as horrible looking as possible do end up making Triple 9 very watchable. Aside from the actors I’ve already mentioned, there’s also Aaron Paul who spends to movie completely drenched in flop sweat while sporting Peter Parker’s emo do from Spider-Man 3 while Clifton Collins Jr. does his best withering Willem Dafoe glare – although fans of Norman Redus might feel that his character is woefully underused much in the same way Benicio Del Toro was in The Usual Suspects.
Grimly joyless and loaded with horrible, abrupt endings for horrible corrupt characters, some may enjoy Hillcoat’s dedication to out and out despair and ugliness (it’s the only film I can’t think of where Kate Winslet plays a soulless mob boss and gets called a wretched fucking c-word for her troubles), but others may just wonder what the point of the whole thing is when it’s impossible to truly connect with any of the characters on show – especially when hardly any of them are due for a happy ending.
While it certainly has its downbeat virtues, Triple 9 is hardly a triple threat.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 