Beginning with a wonky opening chase sequence, \u201cTrigger Warning\u201d lacks urgency. Beginning in Syria\u2019s Badiyat al-Sham Desert, an elite squad led by Parker (Jessica Alba) zip after potential terrorists in CGI trucks that look like Lego vehicles riding across the sand. Parker\u2019s jeep, a jalopy on a soundstage, rocks about as she fires from its window. This isn\u2019t a long sequence, ending anticlimactically with a garishly shot crash of a Syrian\u2019s truck. Its purpose, other than being a banal cold open, is to bloodily dispense with Brown people while portraying Parker as a by-the-book killer\u2014she stops a colleague from executing the Brown prisoners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Indonesian director Mouly Surya\u2019s \u201cTrigger Warning\u201d arose from a screenplay from three scribes: John Brancato, Josh Olson, and Halley Wegryn Gross\u2014and it feels like it. No sooner than that chase sequence, this rural revenge thriller becomes vague. Parker receives an urgent call from Jesse (Mark Webber), the town sheriff, who informs Parker of her father\u2019s sudden death in a mine collapse. She races home to discover a possible suicide note from him and to take over the bar he left. Despite these details, the facts aren\u2019t adding up for Parker. Her father was a former Green Beret, yet the mining accident was supposedly caused by him losing the pin to a grenade. There are also vicious weapons\u2014machine guns, RPGs, and grenades\u2014mysteriously making their way into the area.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTrigger Warning\u201d is a self-serious, brooding film without the wherewithal to know how righteously dumb it could be if it committed to the bit. Or, at least,\u00a0the expertise to elevate it to the suspenseful level it so desperately aims to reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I can personally take a threadbare script\u2014give me light backstories and basic character motivations any day. What I can\u2019t take is an erratic script. The discrepancies spring up often in \u201cTrigger Warning,\u201d most often occurring with the Shaw family. After some investigating, Parker discovers footage her father took with hidden cameras of Elvis Shaw (Jake Weary) making illegal arms deals with domestic terrorists. We take a long roundabout way toward Elvis\u2019 father Senator Swan (Anthony Michael Hall), who\u2019s running for re-election, and Elvis\u2019 brother Jesse\u2019s involvement. Nothing about them makes much sense. How is Elvis testing heavy duty arms by an army base? Why is Senator Swan so interested in Parker\u2019s endorsement? But most all, why are we supposed to be rooting for Parker? The vagueness of her background is often played for laughs. But truly, I want to know the basics of why anyone should find empathy with a shadowy killer like Parker.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s clear that Surya is often fighting against the limitations of her budget and her script. Her previous feature, \u201cMarlina the Murderer in Four Acts,\u201d a rural Indonesian thriller, premiered at Cannes and was selected as Indonesia\u2019s submission for the Academy Awards. She uses that experience well here. Apart from the rickety VFX-heavy scenes, Surya conjures some handsomely mounted shots: the mountainous surroundings, dusty roads, and wooden interiors are warmly captured. Where the action sequences, big shootouts across this small town, fall short, the character-driven sequences, scenes in worn bars and quaint homes, are wonderfully understated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beginning with a wonky opening chase sequence, \u201cTrigger Warning\u201d lacks urgency. Beginning in Syria\u2019s Badiyat al-Sham Desert, an elite squad led by Parker (Jessica Alba) zip after potential terrorists in CGI trucks that look like Lego vehicles riding across the sand. Parker\u2019s jeep, a jalopy on a soundstage, rocks about as she fires from its …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[36,46,37],"class_list":["post-1381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-action","tag-netflix","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}