Jessica Alba stars in Trigger Warning, a generic Netflix action movie with a bizarrely bad title. The film has political issues on its mind, but it can’t manage to find anything interesting to say. It’s mostly a derivative action mess that feels like it should have dropped forty years ago. Trigger Warning wears its inspirations on its sleeves, but it is inferior to most of its predecessors. It does, however, bring a little more to the table than the average Netflix action schlock.
Jessica Alba Claims Netflix’s Top Slot With Trigger Warning
If you’ve seen a mid-tier action movie in the past few decades, it’s probably a knock-off of a film about a man named John. John Rambo, John McClane, and John Wick are the default models for action cinema. You’ve got your wilderness commando, your urban supercop, and your unstoppable assassin. Trigger Warning asks Jessica Alba to do Rambo and Wick simultaneously. That’s how Thunder Road Productions pitched the project eight years ago. Alba plays a Special Forces soldier called Parker, who returns to her New Mexico hometown to investigate her father’s death. Parker digs into a conspiracy involving arms dealers, mercenaries, and a comically racist local senator. The details are only there to justify Alba stabbing dozens of people. We’ve all seen countless versions of this film, but Jessica Alba does a fine job in the lead role. It’s ultimately too boring to feel especially harmful.
The crew behind Trigger Warning deserves a lot better than this. Somehow, this utterly pedestrian, boring, pointless script came from Josh Olsen. Olsen wrote David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Olsen co-wrote with John Brancato of David Fincher’s The Game and Terminator 3. Hailey Gross, who co-wrote The Last of Us Part II, revised the script. Everyone was evidently off their game for this one. The same goes for director Mouly Surya, a rising talent out of Indonesia. Trigger Warning is her English-language debut, but it’s not a fair accounting of her skills. Her 2017 offering, Marina the Murderer in Four Acts, premiered at Cannes before shattering records at Indonesia’s biggest film festival. This is a collection of fascinating creators. I can only read this as everyone agreeing to phone this one in. Either no one cared, or Netflix ruined something half-decent. There’s no way of knowing.
Trigger Warning is Jessica Alba’s first direct-to-Netflix project. It fits fairly well into the massive mess of Netflix original action movies. Most of them are generic, forgettable, and hardly worth reporting on. They almost universally rely on the lead performer as the selling point, hoping that a familiar face in the thumbnail will inspire clicks. Red Notice, Heart of Stone, The Mother, The Grey Man, Blackout, and several other projects follow this format. Trigger Warning will not be the last celebrity-focused action movie on Netflix’s shelf. Based on its current success, we may see Jessica Alba try this bit again soon.
