Trigger Warning

This review may contain spoilers!

 

Trigger Warning follows Parker, a military intelligence officer who returns to her hometown after the death of her father. However, when closer inspection around her father's death leads to suspicious circumstances, Parker delves deeper into the conspiracy sitting at the root of her home. 

This film boasts some pretty pulse-pounding action sequences. While a lot of the fights feel choreographed, they have a gritty edge to them that really makes the action come off as scrappy and desperate.

 

 Jake Weary, who played Elvis, was a really despicable antagonist; Weary's role just felt like he was rotten to the core and had become trapped in that way of life.

However, the best performance came from Anthony Michael Hall, who played Ezekiel. The one thing this film does well, outside of the action sequences, is place some pretty decent antagonists at the forefront of the conflict. This role is a snake of a politician, a conservative individual who masks his more vile traits with a thin helping of charisma. Hall's weapon is that winning smile and his charming line delivery, you know you can't trust him, but he navigates other character's trust well. The real testament to this character is how he descends once the pressure is on, his mania as he fears his empire crumbling. The torture scene where he is rageful and manipulative is probably the best scene of the film.

This feels like a Liam Neeson movie. I don't mean a classic one like Taken, but rather his more recent work of fading action set to a predictable and convoluted thriller plot (so Taken 3). Trigger Warning is a puzzling film, we know Parker is military at first, but the film doesn't really want to ground her exact role in that world of intelligence. She returns home to bury her Dad and the audience is confronted with what feels like a murder mystery; like it's extremely obvious, and it takes the film so long to even open us up to the possibility of suspicious circumstances. That's the ultimate issue here, the film is an obvious blunt instrument of a script, intent with hitting you over the head with the most dull and uninteresting plot details. The fact Parker is caught between her two hometown flames as if this film wants to do some sort of love triangle but never expands on it is odd. The film does this a lot though, Parker's bar burns down, but it doesn't really matter, her buddy Mike is growing a secret weed farm for no reason, there's a terrorist leader who never steps into the role of big antagonist and the whole town rallies behind Parker in the final act for no reason whatsoever. The film barely has a sense of research to the script, I felt the military elements, criminal elements and political elements had barely been worked on for more than a surface level. Worst of all, Parker was a character who never changed nor grew as a person. She found out what happened, took a beating and then killed the bad guys. There was nothing more to her or this film, which wound up making this whole thing one of the worst action-thrillers I've seen in a long time.

This film really doesn't know how to shoot action, which is arguably the most interesting thing about the whole film, the camera just felt slow and simple in how it captured everything. The moments where the film tried to craft a striking visual, such as when Parker twirled her machete, were cringeworthy at times. The editing set a slow pace for the whole time, cutting in action sequences was so bad that the clip between stunt and actor got very apparent. The score was barely present and didn't lend anything to the big moments of the film. The soundtrack felt like the lesser known picks playing off a country radio station at 3am.

Jessica Alba, who played Parker, was entirely the wrong fit to lead this sort of film; Alba was unconvincing as a military personnel member and her brand of stoicism was bland. Mark Webber, who played Jesse, was the weak link amongst the antagonists; his teary-eyed wilting corrupt cop was such a strange role. Alejandro De Hoyos, who played Harry, was a generic flashback father figure; hollow sage-sounding dialogue that you probably won't remember after the scene in question. Tone Bell, who played Spider, felt like an odd and inconsistent role; he was a professional military operator at times and at others he was s smooth individual quibbling over his sneakers. Gabriel Basso, who played Mike, feels like an overeager point of comedy in this; Basso just doesn't mix in well with Alba which leads to a mismatched dynamic. Kaiwi Lyman, who played Ghost, was a very stereotypical menacing guy with a gun big bad; his involvement in this was to just be the meanest presence, but I'm not convinced he succeeded. Stephanie Jones, who played Georgia, was disinteresting as Basso's onscreen Mum; she neither landed the dramatic beats nor the comedic moments offered to her character.

Jessica Alba really fails to be the military intelligence action hero this movie needed, not that this movie had much of a script to work with in the first place. I would give Trigger Warning a 2/10.