Review of Triple 9 (2016) by Derrick H — 25 Feb 2016

Triple 9: a postpartum postmortem.

This is that time of year. A time of year when movie studios try to artfully place movies that they've produced out there when they have limited faith in the viability of the final product. To mix it up a bit, studios occasionally plant sleeper hits in to shine amongst the film flotsam and jetsome.

As my good friend Frank Castle recently said in the Daredevil season two trailer, Triple 9 is only a "half measure" (also a shamelessly witty Breaking Bad reference. I'm looking at you Aaron Paul).

This was a movie made with an actually fantastic ensemble cast. It's starts out strong with a solid Heat themed robbery heist. Things happen, mistakes are made, character profiles are expanded due to the reactions of the principles. Just like Heat.

The first fifteen minutes set up the heist aspect of the story, it reveals dirty cop action, military training, and a predominate discipline of the crew of robbers.

It is really a pretty solid start.

Then it starts to fray.

You see, Heat was a character study, it has dynamic characters, a solid ensemble cast, with a couple notable leads. And it had a beginning, middle and end with very little in the way of ambiguity or straying away from simplicity.

What transpires in Triple 9 isn't the same league at all. It basically turns into a fractured mess. A mess that tries, but is inevitably consumed by its frayed ends.

I think when you do a heist movie, it should be pretty well contained. This is the Achilles heel of Triple 9. You have corrupt cops, good cops, elite military mercenaries, a Russian mob with ambiguous goals, Mexican gangs, ridiculous agents of, I think, the federal variety, drawn out transvestite informant underworld, spy shit, Aaron Paul the drug addict little brother with a weak consistency.... And on and on and on.... There's a weird Russian mob love hate triangle involving black orthodox Russian Jews.... It's like they took Heat, Training Day, Breaking Bad, The Equalizer, Man on Fire, and season one of True Detective , put the scripts in a blender, loaded the mashup into fugazi cannons and shot it onto a movie screen.

And in the midst of ALL of this, they actually managed to stall the story out.

I know that this is a little harsh sounding, that's not the intent here. For where it goes wrong, it does look good and the acting is good. I think this is a case of ambition gone astray.

The cast is great, very talented men who actually do a good job for their parts. The story is made unnecessarily complex though, and that's the failure. This movie could have been made much better by streamlining and simplifying the story. Instead you have basically some vignette conspiracy with some REALLY weird tendrils.

Some of the characters are ridiculously underutilized, while others are just weird. I love Woody Harrelson. I'll say that, but they clumsily set his federal agent character up as a habitual drug user who seems to always be ingesting drugs, yet he is the lynch pin in figuring out the big case. It literally makes no sense whatsoever that his drug use is remotely necessary. He's like the Gary Oldman of The Professional, only he's inherently good at his core and he seems to like using transvestites as confidential informants.... It's just weird and actually stalls the story.

Casey Affleck is set up as an Iraqistan Marine Corps veteran who is very worldly, damaged, yet inherently good (his uncle/mentor is Harrelson). His character is both tactically very capable, yet completely obtuse at the same time. It's frustrating.

Other characters are very suitably intriguing and dirty, yet precariously placed throughout the story. And some real talent is just plain wasted and squandered.

By the end of the movie, I cared very little for ANY of the characters. And the ending shot is just infuriating in its lack of purpose and finality. Seriously, it was like hold still on the random shot, cut to black.....

Then there are whole side stories which chewed up massive screen time while simultaneously could have been completely eliminated. It's just ambitious filmmaking.

Overall, if you like crime/heist movies, you might like it, but probably not love it.

It was best summed up by my good friend Andy Mitchell, who eloquently described it as being a movie that, if you saw it on Netflix, would be a decent Netflix movie. I really cannot think of a better way to sell it.