When the Swanns discover that Parker is closing in on them, ready to blow the lid off their smuggling operation and solve the murder of her dad — he sniffed them out first, and was killed in retaliation — they launch a counter-attack. Directed by the Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya, Trigger Warning is admittedly interesting for around 30 minutes. But once Parker gets her bearings around town and reconnects with old acquaintances, it’s all downhill.

For an action film, there’s barely any action in it. And for a film called Trigger Warning, there are hardly any gunfights. Instead, Parker’s preferred weapon of choice appears to be a knife. She slinks up behind goons and slits their throats. When the scene demands, she is also able to use stray household objects in her vicinity as weapons. While her resourcefulness and background is similar to Jason Bourne’s, the action in Trigger Warning thankfully isn’t edited to within an inch of its life. They’re trying to go for the John Wick style here — gracefully choreographed combat scenes that unfold in uncut shots — but done in a manner that makes it feel like while they got that series’ stunt team but not its smarts.

Trigger Warning’s algorithmic approach to action storytelling can be felt in virtually every scene, but curiously, not in its frames. The movie is far more stylised than the worst offenders in this category, Red Notice, The Gray Man, and the recent Atlas. There’s a vibrancy to the visuals, at least in the first half, because the third act showdown takes place almost entirely inside dimly lit catacombs. Trigger Warning owes more than just a creative debt to the first Rambo film, but its climax is ripped straight out of the franchise’s latest instalment, Rambo: Last Blood. It has none of that film’s raw inventiveness, however, and is way less visceral than it needs to be.

It feels like nitpicking to criticise the acting in films like this; the writing is always too basic to elicit a strong performance. But because there’s nothing else to distract you from it, you can’t help but wonder just how much more palatable Trigger Warning might have been had Alba brought a little flair to her work. She’s left completely stranded by both the writing and the direction, so it’s not her fault, but it’s like she’s disinterested in any scene that requires her to speak. Her performance in a tense exchange where Parker is tied up and tortured by the villains makes it seem as if she might just prefer dying to another second of human interaction. Perhaps Alba thought that turning up for the stunt training was enough.

Trigger Warning also feels oddly under-populated. It’s like the entire town is still practising social distancing. This wouldn’t normally be an issue, especially if the movie itself has established that it’s taking place in a remote location, but the villainous senator in Trigger Warning often talks about exploiting the local Latin community. We never see these people. Parker is a loner — her best friend seems to be a casual work acquaintance — but she doesn’t speak to more than five people in total in this town of hers. All of this only adds to the artifice of this enterprise. As it turns out, the literal lack of human characters is an efficient metaphor for this film’s lifeless narrative.

Trigger Warning
Director – Mouly Surya
Cast – Jessica Alba, Anthony Michael Hall, Mark Webber, Jake Weary
Rating – 1.5/5