Trigger Warning has all the makings of a shrewd contemporary Western, as well as housing career-defining opportunities for two women spotlighting their formidable talents. It’s a story that features great set-ups for deep dramatics: a woman seeking vengeance for the death of her beloved father, brothers on opposing sides of the law, and a corrupt politician puppeteering a criminal operation. Yet the filmmakers frustratingly fail to dig into the familiar territory they’re traversing. What should serve as a warm welcome for Mouly Surya (helming her first English-language picture) and a kick-ass welcome back to lead roles for star Jessica Alba turns into a congealed mess of squandered potential.
Trigger Warning begins with much promise displaying the protagonist’s defining qualities, despite its algorithm-mandated setting of an attention-grabbing pursuit through the Syrian desert. Special Forces commando Parker (Alba) always fights for what’s right, whether that means slaying terrorists out to kill her or defending hostages against trigger-happy racists on her team. Just as she’s wrapping up her latest stint overseas, she gets an alarming call from her ex-boyfriend/town sheriff Jesse (Mark Webber), who informs her that her father has died in a mine collapse and she needs to come home settle his affairs. But upon arriving in Creation (a fictional town in the filming location of New Mexico), she finds that grief isn’t the sole emotion permeating her purview.
Parker picks up on fear from the citizens intimidated by a gang of lawless thugs led by Jesse’s skeevy brother Elvis (Jake Weary), who sports a mullet as prominent as his casual racism. Her hometown is now a hotbed of criminal activity, from muggings and store holdups to sophisticated gun runners selling military-grade weapons to domestic terrorists. And she suspects Jesse and Elvis’ father, conservative Senator Swann (Anthony Michael Hall), is somehow involved in both the crimes and the death of her dad. Naturally, as she and trustworthy pal Mike (Gabriel Basso) investigate, Elvis’ violent cohorts are sent to stop her. Before she can truly put her dad’s memory to rest, she’s called to fight in his honor, brandishing his trusty blade.
Surya—along with writers John Brancato, Josh Olson and Halley Wegryn Gross—pulls narrative inspiration from films like Road House and Walking Tall, mimeographing archetypes, conundrums, and conflicts. The baddies even have a monster truck, perhaps as a nod to the enduring Swayze actioner. Trigger Warning twists itself into knots explaining complicated criminal schemes and pays little attention to the finer details that lead to ridiculous contrivances. Dialogue is awkwardly robotic and cringe-inducing, though the writers’ restraint in waiting to use the obvious line “Elvis has left the building” is admirable. Alba’s delivery of “he really loved that cave”—speaking to the literal man-cave her father perished in—is nothing a human would ever utter with her level of sincerity.
And when Trigger Warning makes a play for original ideas, it fumbles. An overwhelming amount of its internal logic is sloppily constructed and pushes credulity. Whether it’s Jesse figuring out Parker’s cellphone password, or Parker failing to attempt to open her father’s password-protected footage, or Parker being able to spot clues to unsolved crimes yet failing to notice a bullet wound in her dad’s body—it’s all maddening. They cleverly subvert the third act damsel-in-distress trope, using computer hacker Spider (Tone Bell) as bait, but then shamelessly pat themselves on the back by pointing this out in the dialogue. So, no points awarded there either.
Then there are the dead ends with a few of the characters that pad out the picture. Nothing comes from the scene in Mike’s subterranean hydroponic marijuana farm, nor does the murder of Parker’s lawyer increase the crisis. It’s odd that she never thinks twice about his disappearance. Worse yet, and weirdly antithetical to Surya’s previous female-led Indonesian films, the narrative momentum suffers from a notable lack of satiating payoffs. Parker’s face-off with the evil senator, who’s inexplicably subdued when she finds him, happens off-screen. This is a huge letdown, as the film has been building its tension toward this contemptuous clash the whole time. Instead of infusing it with Parker’s long-festering rage, the final fight is devoid of emotion, as if she’s battling a generic Henchman #3. Jesse’s swan song is weak and ludicrous; he’s given no way out of his situation, the three credited screenwriters having written themselves into a corner.
That said, there are a few blessings. Intentional or not, there’s a sense of textured levity amidst the overly-serious shenanigans. An iguana named Andy, looking as bored by the dramatics as we are, might inspire a drinking game. Bar owner Mo’s (Hari Dhillon) armory is stocked to our campy delight. Enis Rotthoff’s sorrowful score drops obvious hints as to the future sour notes of Parker and Jesse’s rekindling affair. It’s a wacky creative choice to insert a mini-scene of a jailed drunk bemoaning that her husband will enroll her in AA within a larger scene featuring Parker breaking into the police station, but Surya pulls it off with aplomb. Even the forgettable action set pieces (with the exception of the sunset silhouette scene where Parker tries out a machete) have their bright spots: Alba’s repetitive fight choreography doubles as a solid self-defense tutorial.
It’s not so much that Alba is miscast. It’s that the material rarely rises to meet her portrait of a grizzled, no-nonsense 30-something out for retribution. She and Webber have no chemistry whatsoever, so little that we wonder how Parker and Jesse were even a couple to begin with. Webber’s performance is too cerebral for the material, while Hall’s portrayal of a duplicitous politician is cartoonish at best and generic at worst. There’s little compelling or intimidating menace to his slippery senator.
It’s clear Trigger Warning relied on the Western’s generic blueprint, specifically those in the aforementioned films where a veteran returns home to clean up crime that’s overtaken their town. However, their application of this formula completely underwhelms. From small mistakes (like not giving the villains a raw intimidating presence, nor giving Parker’s pals any personality) to larger ones (like not giving our heroine’s grief journey any gravitas, nor having her fury fuel her fisticuffs), the resolution doesn’t hit with a lasting impact. Here’s a real trigger warning: This film doesn’t come close to making good on the promise of its premise.