Well, it appears I am unreasonably excited about Triple Frontier. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. At the end of last week, I was moderately excited about it, at most. Now, it’s all I can think about. I’ve watched the trailer five times this week. I might stop typing this paragraph to watch it again now. Yup, I just did. I watched it again between those two sentences. It’s getting out of hand. I don’t know if the movie will even be good. It could be bad! And yet, here I am, all amped up and ready to buzz onto the floor like an electric razor someone placed on the counter without turning off.
Check that, I lied. Not about the excitement thing. That’s very true. I lied about not knowing why I’m so fired up. Look at this official plot description.
Former Special Forces operatives reunite to plan a heist in a sparsely populated multi-border zone of South America. For the first time in their prestigious careers, these unsung heroes undertake this dangerous mission for themselves instead of the country. But when events take an unexpected turn and threaten to spiral out of control, their skills, their loyalties, and their morals are pushed to a breaking point in an epic battle for survival.
Freakin heck yeah. You know what I like most about that paragraph? I mean, other than the fact that there’s a damn Special Forces heist in a jungle? I’ll tell you: It reads kind of like the description of a movie that would star Steven Seagal and Stone Cold Steve Austin and you’d find way, way down near the bottom of Netflix’s Action & Adventure category. I say this because I’ve seen Maximum Conviction, a movie that stars Steven Seagal and Stone Cold Steve Austin as former Special Forces operatives, which was way down near the bottom of Netflix’s Action & Adventure category. It was great. And so bad. I honestly think Seagal was making up his lines on the fly. At one point, while pointing an automatic weapon at someone, he says “It ain’t the amount, it’s the skill. The skill a guy’s got, that’s what it is.” A true wordsmith.
But here’s the thing: Triple Frontier is not a Seagal-Austin-level production. It’s a big deal movie that is opening in theaters this week and coming to Netflix next week. It has a cast that whoops ass. Pedro Pascal, who played the Red Viper on Game of Thrones and a DEA agent in Narcos, whoops ass. Oscar Isaac is great in everything and looks enough like Jake Johnson that I always stop for a minute when I see him, like “Is Nick Miller from New Girl in that helicopter in the trailer?,” which whoops ass. Ben Affleck does not whoop ass all the time, but he is still riding the three-year grace period from starring in The Accountant, a movie that whoops ass. And, while I am not entirely familiar with his body of work, I have been informed by our resident Sons of Anarchy expert Kimberly Ricci that Charlie Hunnam whoops ass, too.
Case closed.
Speaking of the trailer, look at it.
Highlights include:
- A group of thieves doing one last job
- People staring out windows of moving cars with a look on their face that says “Well, one of us is probably gonna die in this movie, and it sure isn’t gonna be Affleck, so I hope it’s not me”
- People creeping around the jungle with automatic weapons
- The required shot of Ben Affleck staring at his daughter after dropping her off at school to tell us he’s a good guy who is doing the crimes for The Right Reasons
- Speeding SUVs
- Exploding SUVs
- Huge stacks of money that belong to a powerful South American drug lord
- Seriously, Oscar Isaac looks so much like Jake Johnson, especially with that stubble beard, and now I want this movie to be titled Triple Frontier: The Pepperwood Chronicles
- I miss New Girl
Now, I hear you. You’re sitting there saying something like this: “Well, fine. But between the plot description and the trailer, it appears that this movie is about a group of exiled specialists teaming up to rob a South American drug lord, and isn’t that basically just the plot of Fast Five, too? Hasn’t this all been done?”
I have two responses to this line of questioning. My first response is shut up, leave me alone, I’m having fun and you can’t ruin it for me. The second response is yes, it is, but so what? There’s plenty of room for two movies about highly-trained diverse teams of beefy heist boys stealing from South American drug lords. There’s room for dozens of those movies, if we’re being honest. Open each one with a helicopter shot of the Cristo Redentor statue in Brazil and then get to robbing cocaine kingpins. It would help if you can get Gal Gadot in there somehow, preferably while developing a romance between her and a character who has great hair and loves snacks and drifting around the streets of Tokyo in a Neon Subaru, but I respect that this is a little trickier now that she’s Wonder Woman and everything.
I am going to be really bummed if this movie is not good or at least fun. I won’t even be mad, just bummed. This is my fault. I let myself get too excited. It happens sometimes.
