Open Road Films
Ben Kingsley. Julianne Moore. Eddie Redmayne. These are all award winning actors guilty of “slumming it”. Some more egregiously than others (really, The Love Guru, Ben Kingsley?), but it’s also understandable. Actors need to work, and sometimes they can be convinced with “this looks like it’ll be fun” and not as hard work as some prestige films. Sometimes they slum for movies that are simply beneath their talents, but sometimes the movies are awful. It happens to the best actors. Phenomenal Chiwetel Ejiofor was in the stupid Roland Emmerich apocalypse movie 2012 and Academy darling Kate Winslet was in that Insurgent movie.
Speaking of those two…
Triple 9 is directed by John Hillcoat, who previously helmed the Tom Hardy/Shia Labeouf/Jessica Chastain flick Lawless, which I mostly enjoyed. In this movie, we start with a bunch of guys stealing something from a bank in a scene that rips off every bank robbery scene ever. It’s purely average. But we are also introduced to the team, led by former special forces veteran Michael (Ejiofor). Also along for the ride are crooked cops Marcus (Anthony Mackie), Jorge (Clifton Collins), and Russel (Norman Reedus). Plus Russel’s nervous, twitchy brother Aaron Paul, whose name in the movie is Gabe.
But he just seems like Aaron Paul to me.
It turns out Michael was hired for the job by a bunch of Russian/Israeli mobsters, led by Irina (Winslet). Michael’s in a jam because he has a kid with Irina’s sister Elena (Gal Gadot, barely in the movie). And if he wants “out” and to be with his son again, he must do one final job. Of course. The job is so difficult that the bad cops decide on a distraction: a Triple 9, a police code meaning an officer is down. There are a few logical leaps there, but whatever. Complicating things is Marcus’ new partner Chris (Casey Affleck), who may be on his way to figuring things out.
So we have a set-up for violence and problems. Chris is the only real “decent” guy in the movie, everyone else is either evil or with a lot of shades of gray. More so shaded on the bad side. It makes things tricky, because who do you root for? It’s an odd situation. This movie has some issues, primarily the pacing. The action scenes are pretty much tense and engaging, culminating in a pretty exciting final act. But a lot of the set-up isn’t as interesting; some characters are barely fleshed out and then killed, meaning we have little reason to care.
There’s an instance of someone literally sharing one loving conversation with his wife before getting brutally murdered. Eye rolling. There are a few logic problems here and there, with some character motivations tossed together in a weird mix. The mobster antagonists are so clichéd and one dimensional it’s hard to take them seriously as villains, despite Kate Winslet bringing a campy fun to her Russian mobster boss.
Looking at the other characters, it’s all about the acting. Anthony Mackie is fine, but sometimes his complexity is too subtle and doesn’t come across well. Casey Affleck is pretty good here, but it’s also a pretty simplistic character. Not much depth. I should also mention Woody Harrelson playing a weird, shady cop and Chris’ uncle. I didn’t really think his performance entirely worked.
The strongest performance is from Ejiofor, because although some of his lines are impossible to take seriously, his non-verbal moments are all killer. I prefer some of his weirder work, which is why I’m really looking forward to him in Doctor Strange later this year. So the acting is pretty decent, but the dialog is inconsistent in terms of quality. The action, when the movie gets there, is pretty good in general. I’d say the weakness is when the movie tries to be overly clever. It really doesn’t pull that part off.
Even if many of the twists are quite obvious, it’s still mostly a fun movie. A dark one, with aspirations to be much better, but it’s not bad. I’ll probably forget it in a year.
Share this post
