Review: Triple Frontier

"The effects of committing extreme violence on other human beings are biological and physiological. That's the price of being a warrior," Charlie Hunnam's military instructor William "Ironhead" Miller tells a group of soldiers at the start of Triple Frontier, an unabashed wade into genre territory from writer-director J.C. Chandor, whose previous works include the criminally underrated A Most Violent Year. Triple Frontier does touch upon those effects on those called to serve for their country only to be ignored once they are no longer useful, but the film is less a gripping psychological portrait and more of an often satisfying but ultimately uneven variation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

The film kicks off Santiago "Pope" Garcia (Oscar Isaac), a former special-ops soldier turned military advisor, leading a heavily armed team as they raid the suspected location of a notorious drug lord by the name of Lorea. Lorea is nowhere to be found, but Pope gleans some information from his informant Yovanna (Adria Arjona): Lorea is in the jungles of South America with about $75 million in cash stashed away. Yovanna agrees to tell Pope the location if he, in turn, helps to smuggle her and her brother out of the country. Money is a great temptress and Pope decides to kill two birds with one stone: rid the country of one of its most evil men and get a handsome payout in the process.

To pull this off, he rounds up his former brothers in arms. There's Ironhead and his brother Ben (Garrett Hedlund), now a mixed martial arts fighter and somehow not tagged with a nickname; Francisco "Catfish" Morales (Pedro Pascal), recently stripped of his license for running cocaine and father to a newborn; and then there's Tom "Redfly" Davis (Ben Affleck), struggling to maintain a relationship with his teenage daughter and doing the best he can to make ends meet by working as a realtor. Each of the men have their reasons for not wanting to be involved in Pope's scheme, but it's clear that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Character development out of the way - and this is shockingly slight character development considering Chandor has displayed quite a keen sense for it in his earlier efforts - Triple Frontier narrows its focus on the heist, which initially goes well before everything goes terribly awry. Lorea's hideaway turns out to have more money than expected and the sight of all that money hidden throughout the house begins to have an insidious effect, particularly on Redfly, whose errors in judgement and return to his former military persona bring about more problems for the crew.

Aided by cinematographer Roman Vasyanov's lensing of the various rugged and perilous terrains that the group must traverse, there's a grit and brawniness to the action scenes that compel. The pulsing distrust and realisation that the money is becoming an albatross is well-realised. Where the film falls short is in the paucity of depth afforded these characters. Isaac, Hunnam, Hedlund, and Pascal are able to get away with it because their characters are written broadly enough that they can fill in the blanks with the strength of their own personas. Affleck, however, plays the character given the most back story and the most intriguing trajectory and simply doesn't do enough to make the character and the story as resonant as they should have been.

Triple Frontier

Directed by: J.C. Chandor

Written by: Mark Boal, J.C. Chandor

Starring: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona