Triple Frontier

UK Release Date. 13 March 2019
Certification. 15

Running Time. 2 hours 5 mins
Director. J.C. Chandor
Cast. Ben Affleck, Adria Arjona, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal.
Rating. 62%

Review.

Triple Frontier wastes little time with introduction or exposition. Instead, cue the pulsating guitar riff of Metallica's For Whom The Bell Tolls. The opening credits reveal Oscar Issac in a Policia helicopter escorting a twelve-vehicle convey as they enter a small favela in some, as yet, unidentified South American country. And we're off - the raid on the drug cartel's hideout is an impressive opening sequence and sets the tone for the remainder of Triple Frontier.

Violence is often swift and brutal, never glamourised. The military operations are plausible and perfunctory. J.C. Chandor directs, following an impressive early filmography that features Margin Call (2011), All Is Lost (2013) and A Most Violent Year (2014), but there is most certainly a Kathryn Bigelow feel to the film. Indeed, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker and Point Break was originally set to direct Triple Frontier and is still listed as Executive Producer. Alongside Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, the journalist who wrote the script for Zero Dark Thirty is also listed as a producer.

Comparisons with the John Huston classic, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre are inevitable. From the initial haul, money is relinquished with each setback. Whilst Triple Frontier endeavours to make salient points about what greed can do, I found it difficult to understand the careless mistakes made in the execution of the military operation. 

Where John Huston developed rich characters in The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, the down-on-their-luck Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Curtin (Tim Holt) and the grizzled old prospector, Howard (Walter Huston), Triple Frontier makes little more than a cursory attempt to explain the five main characters and their motivations. This is a shame, for Triple Frontier boasts a strong cast including Ben Affleck, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, Oscar Isaac and Pedro Pascal. Only Ben Affleck's character, Tom Davis, is partially embellished, as a lumbering, divorced father struggling to maintain a relationship with his teenage daughter (Madeline Wary). However, this illustration only serves to make his character arc even more implausible.

As an aside, the film could do with a better title. The Triple Frontier, or Tres Fronteras, is apparently the name for an area of Amazon Rainforest, the point where the borders of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia meet, and where much of the action takes place in Triple Frontier. Not that I learnt this from the film.