Along with sexy, sweaty Regency-era romance shows and middling science-fiction movies, military and military-adjacent action movies are one of Netflix’s main exports. It’s an easy sell: There will always be a market for stories of righteous soldiers using their tactical training and badass fighting skills to save their country, or save their family, or save their fellow soldiers, or some combination of the three. Trigger Warning, Netflix’s newest thriller starring Jessica Alba, isn’t amazing, but it’s one of the streaming service’s better offerings.
The film opens with Parker (Alba), a skilled Special Forces operative, evading a bunch of terrorists in the middle of the Syrian desert. When her team comes to extract her, she stops one of them from executing their captives in anger—she’s a fighter, but she’s not bloodthirsty. Shortly afterward, a former flame calls to inform her that her father has died due to a cave-in in the mine he was digging on their New Mexico land, so she heads home, taking up residence in her father’s house and working at the local bar he used to own.
But something about her father’s death doesn’t sit right with Parker, and with a gang of black-market arms dealers prowling around the town she soon comes to realize that there’s more to all of this than meets the eye—and her father’s death may not have been an accident after all. Luckily for her, this sort of detective work involves her main skill set: finding creative ways to beat up bad guys.
Trigger Warning is the English-language debut of acclaimed Indonesian director Mouly Surya, best known for thrillers like her 2008 debut Fiksi and 2017’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, the latter of which inspired the term “satay Western” given its Western-inspired narrative and rural setting. Trigger Warning is something of a modern American Western: a soldier returns from war to find her community worse than she left it, determined to avenge the suspicious death of a family member. In this version, Alba slings her fists instead of guns, preferring to fight with hands and knives and, in one particularly creative scene, various construction tools found in a hardware store.
The script is partially credited to writer Halley Gross, who won multiple awards for her work on the survival-adventure video game The Last of Us Part II, and Trigger Warning is indeed very video game-y. The fight scenes are separated by conversations that play like game characters meandering through dialogue trees, each talk containing one or two pieces of information that Parker uses to build her picture of what’s really going on. The fight scenes—every scene without dialogue, essentially—are great as well as numerous, Surya and her crew take plenty of cues from the John Wick-ification trends currently dominating the action genre. You’d think it would get old, but fights that are “like John Wick” are basically good, so I can’t really complain.
Apart from Alba’s Parker, the rest of the movie is populated by the requisite gun-toting goons, three-to-five interchangeable guys with brownish blondish hair and beards who are either allies or adversaries, one guy with a secret cannabis farm and a pet iguana, and a chatty hacker named, of course, Spider. Anthony Michael Hall appears in a few scenes as a vaguely villainous shadow figure, a senator running for reelection who vows to fight for the “freedom, family, and faith” of his constituents, whose political leanings are probably obvious.
The movie keeps things self-consciously current with a few references to “Karens” and a bit about the term “Latinx,” though with a title like “Trigger Warning” you’d expect the characters to trade more barbs about soy-faced libs and alt-right fascists. There are a few nods to Parker’s—and, by extension, Alba’s—Mexican heritage: Her flashbacks to her father and herself as a young girl are entirely in Spanish, and a short scene depicting her father’s funeral is shot like something out of a telenovela, Alba weeping beautifully over strains of Ángela Aguilar’s lament “La llorona.”
If anything, Trigger Warning is a movie for those of us who have missed seeing Alba in action-star mode—in the past few years she seems to have made a point of gravitating towards roles where her characters punch first and ask questions later. Given how terrible other Netflix action movies starring A-list actresses have been lately (looking at you, Atlas, and you, Heart of Stone, and you, Damsel), it feels almost revolutionary to watch one that’s actually engaging. Plus, there’s an iguana in this one.
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