Triple Frontier review: Netflix army-thriller fails to land much needed emotional punches

Triple Frontier is a movie unsure of what it wants to do or say, and as such does nothing and says nothing. Of course, at its core all any movie has to do is entertain. But despite the best efforts of its immeasurably talented cast, Triple Frontier is a slog to get through and feels more of a task than an enjoyable watch.

Triple Frontier is framed as a seemingly anti-establishment tale, a story of disenfranchised soldiers who have sacrificed so much only to come home to a country which can’t, or won’t, care for them.

The characters’ names are almost inconsequential – they are each poster-boys for different types of disillusionment and the consequences of PTSD.

Charlie Hunnam’s William “Ironhead” Miller gives pep talks to incoming soldiers, Pedro Pascal’s Francisco “Catfish” Morales does drugs, Garrett Hedlund’s Ben Miller takes to the boxing ring.

Ben Affleck’s Tom “Redfly” Davis is seemingly the worst off – he has a divorce under his belt and a teenage daughter he can’t afford to send to college; bills are mounting and his day job as a real estate agent is not paying off.

Triple Frontier wants to be an intimate look at the mental and emotional toll of warfare on men but instead, it leans heavily into the misconception that the only way a man should manage his emotions – whether frustration, depression, or disenchantment – is with a gun.

Redfly says it plainly: “Only thing that made it feel better is when you put a gun in my hand. So I guess that’s what we’ll do.”

The moment, undoubtedly horrifying to anyone concerned by the soaring number of gun deaths in America, could have pivoted the film into an intense psychological thriller, challenging our notions of masculinity, of good versus evil, of the unseen scars of battle.

But Triple Frontier isn’t an intimate movie. It’s a loud, brash, war-heroes-turned-cowboys story that fails to land any of its emotional punches.

The mission at hand goes quickly, but the overall pace is plodding, so by the middle it’s easy to expect a huge twist when their plan, of course, goes horribly wrong.

But there is no twist. Instead, it continues in the same, tired vein, and even death elicits nothing more than a shrug.

Triple Frontier could have interrogated why these men would undertake such a risky operation – monetary stability, a sense of justice, the adrenaline rush they miss in their daily lives.

But it doesn’t – leaving a black hole of a missed opportunity, swallowing the film in its wake.

Netflix asks us to forget a lot of global context to enjoy this movie – from gun crime in America to abject poverty.

But art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and even if it did Triple Frontier is not entertaining nor thrilling.

Triple Frontier could have been a movie which illustrates both the machismo rampant in war and the devastation it leaves in its wake.

Instead, Triple Frontier uses dead bodies as shock value to try and make us care when we simply don’t.

In one way, perhaps, Triple Frontier is accurate – it ends “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Triple Frontier is available on Netflix from March 13, 2019