Review: Triple Frontier

Image courtesy of Netflix.

J.C. Chandor's first foray into action moviemaking marks the director's first misstep behind the camera. His previous works - from the Wall Street drama "Margin Call" and the Robert Redford lost-at-sea picture "All is Lost" to the crime thriller "A Most Violent Year" - frequently focused on men with difficult decisions to make, often at the expense of morality. "Triple Frontier" covers similar ground, but much less effectively.

The film's story centers around a private military contractor named Pope (Oscar Isaac) who gets wind of a major drug lord's jungle-based hideout somewhere in South America. Pope concocts a plan to bump off the criminal, all the while stealing millions of dollars that are hidden in the walls of his mansion.

In the vein of such man-on-a-mission action movies as "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Guns of Navarone," Pope enlists the help of some old military buddies, including former commander Redfly (Ben Affleck), a divorcee with a distant daughter who is struggling to sell lousy condos in Florida, as well as motivational speaker Ironhead (Charlie Hunnam), MMA fighter Ben (Garrett Hedlund) and Catfish (Pedro Pascal), a pilot who lost his license for running cocaine.

One of the key problems with "Triple Frontier" is that its characters are underdeveloped. Each one has a "problem" weighing them down, but that's as far as their characterization goes. Much of their dialogue is macho bravado or reminiscing on the old days in the military. The script is loaded down with cliched dialogue, which is a surprise considering that the picture was originally supposed to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow and was written by her frequent collaborator Mark Boal, who wrote the far superior "The Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty."

As an action film, "Triple Frontier" has several action sequences that are well-enough made, and the film's locales are gorgeous. It's a shame that the film doesn't have much more to offer. Isaac is always a captivating screen presence, but he is given little to do here - and the same goes for the rest of the talented cast.

Similar to the ending of "Zero Dark Thirty," the characters in Chandor's film ponder whether all of the trouble they went through to achieve their goal was worth it after all. While the characters are the "good guys," so to speak, they frequently engage in behavior that makes them more anti-heroes. At times, the film appears to be considering the way greed overcomes good men as a major theme, and one gets the impression that it will go the way of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," but it never fully explores the concept.

Chandor is a fine filmmaker, but this is his first misstep. It's not a bad movie, just a relatively generic one, an action picture that we've seen done better too many times before. Considering all of the talent involved, one might have expected better results.