The rough tough warrior males in J. C. Chandor's Triple Frontier (2019, Netflix) all have U.S. Army special forces training. Unfortunately, that training, while constituting graduate school level instruction in murder and mayhem, didn't include geography. Any mission that involves hiking over the Andes Mountains "to the sea" in the course of three or four days is likely to fail. Trust me, I've eyeballed the Andes -- it's not a three day stroll over the peaks to the Pacific. The uncertain geography afflicting Triple Frontier and the protagonist's apparent ignorance of their location is exemplary of the narrative credibility problems afflicting this high-prestige Netflix production. Written by Mark Boal, and originally slated for direction by Katherine Bigelow, the picture bears some of the characteristics of the execrable Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow's celebration of warrior-male derring-do incidentally about the execution of Osama bin Laden, but really just a tribute to murder, torture, and the egregious violation of international law. The absurdly confusing and dull Zero Dark Thirty was a big deal when it was released -- it's gung-ho combination of jingoism and revenge appealed to the post 9-11 crowd braying for murderous justice and the picture won a lot of Oscars including Best in Show. But it's a dog and I don't think anyone would voluntarily watch that movie today. Triple Frontier, which never bothers to explicate which three international borders are breached, complicates the gung-ho savagery of Zero Dark Thirty with huge doses of magical thinking, and, after an entertaining first hour, slips into implausible, even, inexplicable fantasy.
Triple Frontier begins with an assault by a death squad on some high altitude favela, possibly in Brazil, although the movie is too lazy to identify the place. It's a new look for this kind of picture, a kind of Alpine meadow through which a road and river runs, with hillsides lined by improbably steep, impoverished neighborhoods. After some impressive drone shots, the movie gets down to business which is showing people being killed. The quasi-military death squad attacks a squalid disco that is a drug emporium for Leola, a violent narco-trafficker. Pope, a CIA operative and advisor, leads the raid and, in fact, fires a rocket-launcher delivering the coup de grace to the bad guys -- he, then, attributes the shot to one of the soldiers. I think they are supposed to be Columbian troops. There's a girl in the structure that gets blown up and she's a sort of confidential informant (as we discover after a ludicrously strenuous chase through the vertical village -- the chase is the first sign that the film's plotting is suspect: if there was a CI in the drug house then why did the troops blithely fire indiscriminately at the place with rocket launchers and, then, why does Pope chase the girl on foot for about a mile when, instead, the two of them could have established contact and given up the fiction of the pursuit after about two blocks.) Pope forms a plan to raid the jungle mansion of the big drug lord Leola. He has everything worked out and inscribed in a loose-leaf notebook. The concept is to assassinate the evil narco-lord and steal his money -- apparently more than 250 million dollars. To this end, Pope recruits four other ex-special forces rangers -- these include a washed-up realtor specializing in shabby seaside condos, a drug addicted pilot, a military liaison who lectures special forces troops on PTSD and urges them not to sell their skills as mercenaries (something that he blithely does himself), and an Ultimate Fighting champ who is apparently not too successful in the Octagon. With this team of heroes, Pope hustles to the Brazilian border, reconnoiters the bad guy's mansion, and, then, mounts a quasi kill-Bin-Laden raid on the compound, killing everyone in sight. After the manner of Ozark, the walls of the house turn out to be stacked high with greenbacks, "Benjamins" as Congresswoman Ilhar Omar would have it, and the special forces guys fill up about 200 bags with folding money. (The military man who give lectures against mercenary work get shot through the side, a wound that leaves a gory hole in him about the size of a coffee-mug -- it's no problem; he just stuffs the gaping wound with bandages, shows a stiff upper-lip and soldiers on none the worse for wear.) Our heroes, then, hurry to a hidden air strip and with the beautiful confidential informant (and her kid-brother) and commandeer a helicopter to take them over the Andes. Unfortunately, they have seized too much contraband money. The cash is too heavy to successfully fly over the main range of the Andes which, as one might say, is a bit lofty -- the film claims the peaks are 11,000 feet high. Here is where the movie's geography begins to spin out of control. The foothills of the Andes are 11,000 feet high; Cuzco is at that altitude. Of course, the actual massif is much, much higher. The pilot does some calculations and determines that immutable laws of physics don't allow the helicopter to fly at the necessary altitude to cross over the mountain range lugging thousands of pounds of currency. But we're dealing with Navy Seals and Army Rangers, Special Forces one and all, and they determine that the laws of physics don't apply to them or can be overcome by their gung-ho attitudes. So they load up the vast amount of loot and set forth to fly over the mountain range. They get to Peru and do off-load the gorgeous CI and her sibling (giving them the address of a safe-house in Australia and three million in cool cash.) Of course, the laws of physics don't yield to magical thinking and so the helicopter can't get over the icy spine of mountains. The helicopter crashes amidst the fields of some humble, if bellicose, coca-leaf farmers. A confrontation develops and our heroes slaughter most of the men in the village, something that understandably upsets the survivors. (The good guys pay off the grieving villagesr with one million dollars -- this leaves about 246 million.) Renting some mules, our band of brothers, then, sets off to march across the Andes with their loot. This is posited to be a three day hike. (Of course, the march would be about 300 miles, a mostly vertical trek, that would take months.) The mules can't make the last uphill stretch, it's a giant granite rock-fall, and so the boys have to carry the loot up grade, now about 100 bags packed with long green. There's a shoot-out at the pass and the unsuccessful realtor is killed. (For the rest of the film, they haul his body-bagged corpse around.) Chastened, the remaining bandits toss the rest of the money into an abyss and stroll down to the sea-shore. (The ocean has moved magically close to mountain pass.) At the sea-shore, suddenly, we're in Hawa'ii's sugar cane fields (not the Atacama desert). There's a chase in the house-high sugar cane, another gun battle on a picturesque (Hawaiian) beach, and our heroes finally escape by sea. There's a coda in some unnamed country where money-laundering is a principal industry and an excruciatingly idiotic ending.
The film's meanings are precisely the opposite of what it intends. Designed to show the omni-competence of the heroes, the movie demonstrates that its protagonists are naïve idiots with no command of geography, navigation by air, local mores, or, even, simple arithmetic. Pretending that the heroes are men of principle, the film shows them to be dangerously trigger-happy thugs. Insisting upon its verisimilitude, the picture shows us a surreal mélange of landscapes knit together by the spurious magic of editing -- credits show the film was shot in Hawa'ii (Kaeu'i), the Sierra Nevada, and Columbia: the one place it wasn't shot was in the Andes. The problem with this kind of movie is that it remains entertaining in direct proportion to its plausibility -- if you begin a film insisting upon strict realism, you can't totally jettison realism half-way through the picture. The film's military hardware is probably all accurately depicted, but everything else is completely and obviously made up. Triple Frontier is now the most popular movie in the US. And it is half-way entertaining, but the thuggish enterprise founders on the most elemental of problems: it just isn't believable on any level.
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