Movie Review: Triple Frontier
Triple Frontier opens in a “shithole” location of choice somewhere in the border between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil (hence the movie title) with an appetite-whetting shootout between the police and goons working for local drug lord, Lorea (Reynaldo Gallegos).
Post the shootout, a female captive, Yovanna (Adria Arjona) escapes and is given hot pursuit by Santiago (Oscar Isaac), a former American special-ops turned freelance tactical advisor to the police.
Next up, we find out Yovanna is actually Santiago’s informant and she lets on that she can show him Lorea’s hideout in the jungle which doubles as his money house given his distrust of banks. However, her cooperation is offered on the condition that he help her and her brother escape from the country.
Santiago returns to America to put together a team comprising his former special-ops buddies to undertake a reconnaissance of the jungle to locate Lorea’s hideout.
Brimming with typical American military-type machismo, the team comprises former special-ops captain, Tom (Ben Affleck), William (Charlie Hunnam), William’s younger brother, Ben (Garrett Hedlund) and designated pilot, Francisco (Pedro Pascal).
Post their special-ops days, Tom now sells real estate, William is a military motivational speaker by day and at ring side at night to cheer his brother, Ben’s fight club fights. Francisco lost his pilot licence to a cocaine run bust. All five of them feel shafted by Uncle Sam, and Santiago’s plan offered them one last hurrah at a better life.
After a successful reconnaissance of Lorea’s lair, it didn’t take long for the other four to agree to Santiago’s plan that they rob the cash stashed there. And this is where the movie’s underpinnings of greed and moral codes truly begin.
Much to their surprise, their initial projection that Lorea had a cash stash of $75m in his house was wrong. They take over Lorea’s house with very little resistance and discover a mother lode of $250m. This is a temptation even the viewer cannot resist. Seeing more cash than they had envisaged, greed sets in and in hauling in more than they had planned for, they eat into their get-away time.
The second half of the movie unfurls the consequence of this greed and establishes the moral conundrum the movie foists on the team and expects the viewer to fathom as they embark on an intrepid escape journey of survival.
For a team that was previously satisfied with stealing just $75m, the prospect of getting away with their $250m haul blinded them to the dangers escaping with a loot of that magnitude posed. Grave consequence for this came in the form of a helicopter crash that was made even more jarring remembering the recent Ethiopian airline crash.
Several times in the movie, hints were dropped to remind the viewer of the moral rectitude of the team notwithstanding the nature of their previous lives as former special-ops operatives.
They had expressed reservation about taking out Lorea when, during the reconnaissance, they discovered his family lived with him in his jungle hideout.
There was mention of how during their special-ops days, they had transported $20m in the course of an operation and had not been tempted to pocket some of it for themselves.
However, in a particularly testy confrontation with some villagers after their helicopter crash, Tom mows down some of the villagers in a bid to ward them off their loot.
While this can, perhaps, be excused on the extreme exigency of the situation, their moral compass becomes questionable in the next scene where Tom pulls out a few bundles of cash from a duffel bag to compensate the villagers.
One would have expected that given the amount of cash they had, a duffel bag or two of cash would have been a more appropriate compensation, especially when in a subsequent scene, the team greeted Ben burning a duffel bag of cash to warm them up from the freezing cold with laughter.
But overall, when compared with the buzz you feel when you first watch its trailer and then subsequently after seeing the full movie, Triple Frontier over-promised and under-delivered.
Its storyline was genre-formulaic, the characters were rote and uninspired or uninspiring, the acting was unenergetic (especially Ben Affleck’s who seemed to be weighed down by the general sense of ennui observable in his Bruce Wayne/Batman in the DCEU movies he has featured in) and even though the action sequences were impressive enough to satisfy the escapist cravings of the viewer, in the end; it leaves you unsatisfied.
Hollywood has always been the cultural curator of American globo cop machismo and faux moral rectitude. In countless movies, Hollywood has tried to whitewash the mercantile leanings of American mercenary interventions in stereotype 3rd world shitholes to oust a murderous dictator or take out a ruthless drug lord with the questionable moral codes of bad-ass American mercenaries and other military types airdropped into such shitholes.
Netflix’s Triple Frontier continues this time-worn Hollywood narrative with barely any attempt to flip the script even if in pretension of observing the political correctness of today’s conventional wisdom. 4.5/10
