Bullet Points: Trigger Warning (2024)
2024 has been a good year thus far for action movie releases on Netflix… Sixty Minutes, Badland Hunters and City Hunter were all thoroughly entertaining and movies I would gladly recommend to anyone that would listen. Will 2024’s Trigger Warning join that terrific trio and keep my positive Netflix streak alive? There’s only one way to find out…
- Hot Start: Trigger Warning opens with a desert chase in Syria, where we first get to see how much of badass Parker (Jessica Alba, Machete) is, as Parker uses her Special Forces training to take out the terrorists that were pursuing her. With a successful mission behind her, Parker is about to get some devastating news from back home… her father died in a cave in.! Naturally, the next time we see Parker she is returning home to Swann County. Parker’s first stop is to see the sheriff (and her high school beau) Jesse Swann. Jesse’s family basically own the county (hence the name) with Jesse’s dad, Senator Swann (Anthony Michael Hall, Into the Sun) being the most powerful man in town.
- Changes: Trigger Warning borrows a bit from the classic Walking Tall formula, as things aren’t exactly as Parker left them in her hometown…. known troublemaker Elvis Swann, Senator Swann’s youngest son, and his hooligan friends have graduated from being immature assholes to arms dealers! And worse Elvis has been using the mine on the property that belonged to Parker’s father to smuggle the stolen arms from a nearby Army depot and sell them to a domestic terrorist. Does the Senator know about this? What about Elvis’ older brother, the sheriff? And more importantly was Elvis responsible for the death of Parker’s father?!?
- Start and Stop: You would think once all the questions I just asked were answered the movie would really start cooking… but that was not the case. There was a lot of start and stop action and as a result Trigger Warning never built up any momentum. Jessica Alba did well with a variety of action scenes. And Alba’s Parker and her backup… fellow Special Forces commando, Spider (Tone Bell) and family friend, Mike (Gabriel Brasso) were all likable protagonists. But again… there was just no oomph behind what was going. My other gripe was that Anthony Michael Hall felt a bit wasted here, he should have been featured more… plus while Hall was on the screen, I could not help but think that the original Rusty Griswold is now old enough to play a Senator with two grown adult children… which reminded me that I am old too. And the fact that I had time to think about all that while the movie was still going on speaks volumes.
Trigger Warning is not unwatchable, but it is unremarkable. If you aren’t a diehard Jessica Alba fanatic, I would not go out of your way to check out Trigger Warning… not when there are plenty of other movies out in the streaming world that would be more effective use of your time.
