If you’ve ever found yourself caught up in a game of Three
Card Monte, you’ll have some idea of what sitting through John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 is like. Simultaneously over-plotted yet full of holes, the director
has assembled a first-rate cast that does their best to bring a degree of
emotional integrity to the film that it simply doesn’t merit. While there’s no denying that the grit
Hillcoat creates in the film goes a long way towards creating a palpable sense
of realism, Matt Cook’s debut script relies far too much on coincidence,
straining the film’s credibility to the breaking point.
The old ballpark saying that you can’t know the players
without a scorecard certainly applies here as the roster of nefarious
characters is overstuffed by about five.
While space prohibits me from creating a character tree or some sort of
flow chart to explain the various connections between the people in question,
I’ll do my best.
Irina Vlaslov (Kate Winslet) heads up the Russian Mafia,
which is operating out of Atlanta, Georgia (?) She longs to get her husband out
of the Russian gulag where he’s locked up and she needs to track down two
McGuffin’s in order to get his release.
However, these items are under lock and key; one is in a safety deposit
box in a bank in the most deserted neighborhood in downtown Atlanta, the other
in a high-tech vault housed in an office belonging to a computer firm.
In order to get these items, she blackmails her
brother-in-law Michael (Chiwetel Ejiofor) into pulling together a crew in order
to steal them. A former Special Forces
officer, he calls on old associates to get this done. They include brothers
Russel and Gabe (Norman Reedus & Aaron Paul) and crooked cops Marcus and
Jorge (Anthony Mackie & Clifton Collins, Jr.). What with the first job
going horribly wrong, these desperate men try to regroup before going back into
action again. However, a new wrinkle is
introduced in the form of officer Chris Allen (Casey Affleck, in another good
performance) who’s assigned to partner with Marcus and suspects from the start
something’s not right with his new colleague.
As if the cast weren’t crowded enough, Woody Harrelson is
also on hand as Allen’s uncle, a burnt out cop with a serious drug problem, as
is Gal Gadot as Elena, Irina’s sister.
How the new Wonder Woman and Ms. Winslet supposedly came from the same
gene pool is beyond me but this oversight in casting is the least of the film’s
problems.
While it may seem that I am nitpicking, heist films open
themselves up to a degree of scrutiny that many other movies don’t. What with so much time and talk devoted to
things going off like clockwork, it stands to reason that the viewer be more
attune to the minute details that swirl about the action. Though Atlanta sports a population of nearly
half-a-million, the streets of the city are sparsely populated throughout,
allowing the film’s thieves to take all the time they need to pull off their
jobs. Equally odd is the fact that it
takes Harrelson’s character, and every other cop in Atlanta, so long to get to
the site of a shooting involving officers from their precinct. Aren’t there designated areas officers should
be in that are relatively close to their station house?
These are the most glaring examples of a flawed script that
includes far too many coincidences to hold water, as characters show up out of
the blue and loose ends are tied up far too conveniently. While the cast puts
the requisite amount of sincerity in their roles, they’re unable to overcome
Cook’s sloppy script. While “Triple 9”
contains many moving parts, in the end they can’t obscure the many flaws at its
core.
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 2, 2016.
