Mouly Surya’s first English-language directorial outing, Trigger Warning, is a monumental bore. It is a bright, alarming example of over-reliance on algorithmic mechanics to drive a plot that can barely survive being strapped onto a series of stock sequences sans any rich, moving character dynamics. It has no patience and time for indulging in the emotional lives of its characters, choosing instead to operate in a brisk, businesslike mode that could have made for inoffensive viewing if it weren’t so damn stilted.
The result is a clunky enterprise that screeches its way to a spectacularly disappointing, predictable finale. Though the action flick bends at times to accommodate impressive stunts and moves, the film defuses quickly into a flat collage of disjointed, convenient scenes that fail to emotionally engage and stimulate. An emotional association may not be an absolute necessity, sure, but when an interminable number of sequences resemble something close to mindless factory produce, the viewer needs other ingredients to rely on. The film makes the cardinal mistake of forgetting this.
Surya primes the lead, Jessica Alba, as a super-charged, unstoppable action figure. Playing Special Forces Commando, Parker, the actress, is tasked with ample opportunity to display and show off serious action moves, but the emotional side of the character is so painfully underdeveloped we struggle to establish any enduring connection with her. Parker is a character making the vaguest impression in only the broadest of strokes. The film opens in Syria, where the most generic scene is set up to establish Parker’s unbending righteous spirit. She has a strong, unflappable moral core that’s not swayed by spur-of-the-moment heightened emotion and passion. She will always stick to the most honorable, honest path of action, even if it may not be the most satisfying one.
When the former boyfriend-turned-sheriff of her hometown, Creation, Jesse (Mark Webber), informs her of her father’s sudden death, she returns home, shocked and suspicious. Everyone suggests her father died either by suicide or an accident. The mine where he was found was supposed to have caved in, leading to his death. The cave used to be a precious space for her father. However, Parker refuses to buy the death as suicide. Although she hadn’t been around him for a while, she asserts she knows him intimately enough that he couldn’t have taken such a decision. Neither does an accident make any sense to her since he would have been very cautious, and the space was an intensely familiar one. Her inklings point to murkier happenings.
She realizes linkages between pervasive arms thefts, most linked to Jesse’s less-honorable brother, Elvis (Jake Weary), and her father’s probable murder. Even when everyone around her tries to dissuade her from it, she remains determined and unafraid. Elvis would have been put behind bars much earlier had it not been for the active abetting and sheltering provided by his father, Senator Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall).
It is Ezekiel who is probably the most amusing character or at least someone who registers with traces of a specific personality, especially his particular and direct prejudice towards minority communities. He confesses to her he cannot quite understand what Latinx means. But these gleefully ridiculous moments are too few and far between in this film, which doesn’t let a single character grow into anything striking. The baddies are all assembly lines, and the stakes don’t accrue any real weight of danger. We are sure of the protagonist’s ultimate victory.
Almost everything in Trigger Warning borders on the nondescript. The reveals are as eye-roll-obvious as the acting, which sticks to the workmanlike. This is a peculiarly muted affair. An action flick like this needs a marginal degree of thrill and suspense. Both are swapped for a turgid, stagnating experience despite the plot chugging ahead with a burst of events and gunfire. Alba, who is also an executive producer on the film, may have seen in it potential for her to kick ass, which it does offer her in spades. Nevertheless, the rest of the film sinks along with its half-baked, sketchy appraisal of an undercover operation with illicit threads to the military. There’s no engine driving this adamantly by-the-numbers film that forsakes every shred of characterization and convincing, plausible narrative development.
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