Netflix’s Triple Frontier is tense and surprisingly unpredictable

Triple Frontier has an incredible cast and has a lot of the familiar trappings of your typical action movie, but it does enough differently to stand out.

The first thing that gets your attention about Triple Frontier is the cast. Featuring an Oscar winner in Ben Affleck, Golden Globe winner Oscar Issac, and fan favorites from tv shows in Charlie Hunnam and Pedro Pascal, it’s hard to ignore this film. However, the setup seems all too familiar so you may have been planning to leave it buried on your Netflix watch list.

I’m here to tell you why you shouldn’t and I plan to do so without spoilers so know that it is safe to read on.

The premise

Triple Frontier introduces us to its world by thrusting us straight into the action with Oscar Isaac’s character, Pope. He’s working in Brazil to help take down a Pablo Escobar type drug lord and it has become personal for him. Once his informant Yovanna (Adria Arjona) lets him know that Lorea (Reynaldo Gallegos) has the forces that he’s working with bought, Pope decides to head back stateside for help.

Back in the states, he reaches out to Charlie Hunnam’s character, “Ironhead” who is working as some type of instructor for ex-special forces types. He’s helping them transition back into civilian life from what you can tell. Ben Affleck’s character “Redfly” is working as a realtor (and he’s not good at it) and he’s having a hard time with money. Garrett Hedlund plays Ben, the brother to Hunnam’s character and he’s an MMA fighter. Finally, Pascal’s character is the pilot, “Catfish.” He lures them in by telling them that he just needs them to run a recon mission and that it’ll pay 17 thousand each for the job and they can go home after this. The guys seem to defer to their former leader, Redfly and since he’s got a kid he has the most to lose.

Desperate for the money, Redfly agrees to go and our action truly begins.

The missions

One of the more fun parts of the movie was the way the missions were carried out. The camera work, the dialogue, and the execution of the missions all feel like a video game. The tension is real and the way the group splits up and trusts each other feels real. They were a highly trained team but they’re not perfect and things don’t always go as planned. It’s clear that they were an elite team but that there is some rust since they’ve been apart for a few years.

The film does a good job of keeping you on your toes and you never know when or where things are going to go wrong until they do. Even then, the way the team reacts in those situations is not cookie cutter which was refreshing to see.

The characters

In these films, there is a tendency to go overboard with the Patriotic stances and the typical brotherhood dialogue but the film takes a sharp turn away from this as it goes along. It sets you up for this in the beginning but by the time you’re thick into the action you see a lot of the human sides of the characters come out. Civilian life combined with the fact that they aren’t on a normal mission cause people to act out of the character others are familiar with and there are tense moments within the group while they’re still trying to survive together.

At some point, you start to wonder if this is a mission that is going to end poorly for everyone or great for everyone by the end and that should always be the goal with these films.

Overall

Going into Triple Frontier I was hoping to be surprised and I was. I appreciated the characters not being stereotypes as well as the way that the film built its tension. The movie keeps you guessing from start to finish and has an ending that is fitting for the way events unfolded. If you are looking for Oscar-worthy action or writing then you are in the wrong place. What makes this movie good is the fact that it doesn’t try to do more than it has to but does enough to avoid being generic.

Though some will see it as a weakness, the strength of Triple Frontier is that it lets its characters be human.

If you enjoy action movies, you’re going to enjoy Triple Frontier.