Triple Frontier is 2019 action film about five former Special Forces operatives who reunite to plan a heist in a sparsely populated multi-border zone of South America.
Director J.C. Chandler hasn’t a long list of movies to his name yet, but those that do populate that short list are, if anything, bold and decidedly experimental. From his debut film Margin Call to his critically-acclaimed All is Lost, he has compiled a short collection of provocative titles that have earned him a place among the top innovators in his class. With his latest project, Triple Frontier, he once again commits to his craft, delivering a complex, chaotic thriller with an honest to goodness punch.
In the harsh corners of South America, Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia (Oscar Isaac) has been on the hunt for drug lord Gabriel Martin Lorea (Reynaldo Gallegos), desperate to end him but coming up short time and time again. This has caused him to put his lover Yovanna (Adria Arjona) in ever-increasing danger, using her as an informant. At his wits end, giving up on the bureaucracy that keeps the bad guys free, he returns to the United States to recruit his old Army Ranger pals, including William (Charlie Hunnam) and his brother Ben (Garrett Hedlund), Francisco (Pedro Pascal), and Tom (Ben Affleck) in securing a cache of seventy-five million dollars and keeping it for themselves. Naturally, plans go south and the men soon find themselves in a fight for their lives, but not at all they way they thought it’d be.
It’s not uncommon for an action movie to kick off with a taste of what’s to come, maybe a bit of a shoot ’em up in introducing a main character. Triple Frontier follows suit as Pope and a cadre of police attack a lowrent dance hall in search of their target, meeting with some rather explosive resistance. While it does serve to establish the frustration and jarring violence Pope has been wallowing in for three years, it better builds a tight layer of suspense that tethers itself to the rest of the movie. That’s where Chandler does this movie right, setting up moments of teeth rattling tension through carefully plotted moments that not only strike with swift impact but feel well entrenched in the mostly very simple story.
Typically with an ensemble cast like this in a tale spinning around big guns a muscle aplenty, there’s little in the way of getting to know the characters behind a few quips. It’s not that Chandler (and co-writer Mark Boal) avoid this cliché, the film not exactly paying a lot of attention to the backstories of these men, but it does stop just enough here and there to breathe some life into at least the ones we most care about. Taking front and center, Affleck is jarringly good as the team’s former commander, playing an aging yet determined warrior with a need to feel worth and thrust into a hurricane of madness he needs to handle. Or die trying. Isaac is also strong, betrayed and scarred by futile efforts that have him choosing a troubling path.
There are surprises in all this that reveal a filmmaking team understanding the tropes of the heist genre and doing their best to play into and then subvert expectations. You think you know what is going on but in fact, well … I dare not say. This isn’t an Expendables riff, more a mix between Sicario and well, Alive. It might in fact disappoint some looking for a wall-to-wall shooter, the film in the second half taking a whole a different spin, but one that is in many way better than the first. It’s gripping and more than the average brawny blockbuster. Highly recommended.