3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Trigger Warning

2024, Mouly Surya (Marlena the Murderer in Four Acts) -- Netflix

Surya came out with her last movie in 2017, Marlena the Murderer in Four Acts, right into the pandemic. She had been approached by Netflix right around the time that movie premiered at Cannes. But, of course, the production got delayed. But even before that, I guess Netflix was doing the thing where they find a director whose visual cues they like and offered them American money to do something (more accessible) for them? Is it even Hollywood? Am I saying that sometimes the purple suit business is not all bad business? But is it? Is it all about cost effectiveness? Lack of expectation? More control over a foreign body unfamiliar with the industry in this part of the world? Probably, but I still believe they saw something in her movies, and in her, and that the act of making a movie in North America prepares a director for something invaluable they can use going forward. Even if every day on set was guided by purple values, she still got to do it.

And despite the panning, I didn't find the movie all that bad. The usual comparisons to John Wick and even Rambo are confusing; lazy. If I was to do any comparisons, it would be to Reacher, in that a skilled military agent gets mixed up in small town corruption, with an added dose of revenge for fun. I mean, the dialogue was ... lacking, and gladly they skipped the quipping, but it many ways it was more a mood piece between Surya and Jessica Alba. I honestly think the two women worked well with the uninspired material given to them, which is a shame, but again, purple meddling wants easily done products, not constant reshoots and script tweaking.

Parker (Jessica Alba, Dark Angel) survives a mission in Syria, along with her friend Spider (Tone Bell, Whitney). What does she do? Doesn't matter, its just enough to know she is a military trainer operator with skills. She gets a call from home -- her father has died in an accident, so she returns to Creation, New Mexico. She hasn't been back in a while but her old friends, the now Sheriff Jesse Swann (Mark Webber, Scott Pilgrim vs the World), and stoner Mike (Gabriel Basso, The Night Agent) expect her to take over her father's bar, built in an old mine outbuilding. But she's just back to settle her father's affairs and sell the land.

Until she finds evidence the mine collapse was not natural. There is scoring on the rocks that suggests explosives, like a grenade. She starts poking around and runs afoul of Jesse's brother Elvis (Jake Weary, Animal Kingdom), who turns out is selling military weapons stolen from a local base. Parker calls Spider to use his tech skills to do some digging. Her investigations lead to the bar being burned down, and Parker arrested for the death of one of Elvis's friends.

From there, things just escalate, revealing corruption in all of the Swann family, including her old boyfriend Jesse, and their father Senator Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall, The Dead Zone). Spider comes to help and after a requisite amount of violence for these kinds of movies, she gets her revenge.

These movies are never outside their wheelhouse, but Surya is able to give it a certain amount of gravitas, especially when we are alone with Alba. You can see a desire to tell Parker's story from the quiet moments, to further enhance the bursts of well-controlled violence. If this is to be her break into the western film industry, I hope she is able to get back to movies from her heart. While I haven't seen any of her previous films (I have just downloaded Marlena), the descriptions tell me she was not doing the Indonesian equivalent to stock action-thrillers, but... well, things that get Cannes attention.

Still not sure why the movie was called Trigger Warning. In today's parlance its usually associated a slur against sensitive people who need to be warned against content that might trigger an emotional response, but nobody in this movie was sensitive. I suspected that the original script may have made references to Parker being prone to intense violent outbursts, thus her leaving town, thus her line of work, but if so, it was entirely milked out of the movie. She was not "triggered" into investigating her father's murder, just doing what was expected.