Triple 9 is a gritty, in your face, rollercoaster ride of a movie that just manages to balance some convoluted but underdeveloped storylines with a massive ensemble of characters.
Directed by astute Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat, the plot of Triple 9 is perhaps better understood than it is explained. However, put simply, it is about many people who are respectively pushed ever tighter into various corners. Eventually, something has to give. In this case, utter pandemonium rains down on everyone in the film.
We have the really bad guys, the Russian mafia led by a completely reinvented Kate Winslet. We have the bad guys, led by a hot tempered but ultimately professional Chiwetel Ejiofor. Then we have the police, who also have some very questionable moral fibre going on (see Woody Harrelson). If you’re waiting to see who the good guys are well there’s possibly just one, Casey Affleck’s Chris who still believes he can make a difference as a detective.
As you’ll see from the trailer, women, most notably Winslet (although she is also being controlled), hold a lot of power in the film and control most of what happens. Ejiofor and his crew (which includes Norman Reedus, Aaron Paul, Anthony Mackie, and Clifton Collins Jr) are being coerced into performing robberies they’d rather not do, especially since the jobs are becoming much harder. All of their lives are getting more complicated by the day and things have never been more dangerous. The police are using any means necessary to try to track them down and Winslet’s character Irina is a callous, bloodthirsty monster. Desperation is a big theme of the movie and you feel it through almost every character as they make bad choice after bad choice.
John Hillcoat is renowned for his use of tension and is never afraid of putting confronting imagery in front of the audience. We get all of his strength’s here. Some of the violence is shocking, some heart-breaking, and some nerve grating. There are a few scenes in particular that really hit hard and raise the film above being a messy action thriller, which it might have been under different direction.
The colour red is an unmissable motif in the film, perhaps because every cost is paid in blood. I struggle to remember a scene that wasn’t tinged with it. Winslet’s dominatrix is the personification of this symbolism, ruthlessly pulling strings and destroying lives like it’s simply a matter of business, which for her it is. As we learn by the end of the film, there’s no one who can escape the bloodstains.
The film is terrifically well cast and the performances are all good. The main issue with the film is the sheer size of the story. There’s simply not enough time to flesh out everyone’s backstory or motivations, so it makes it hard for the audience to really get on side with anyone. The complexity of the plot is not balanced with suitably intricate characters. Anthony Mackie is always charismatic even when he’s playing a criminal, and we do sympathise with Ejiofors predicament but we don’t have enough knowledge of these men to get as engrossed in their struggles as we’d like to. Hillcoat does his best but when you have to devote screen time to six or seven other central characters you’re always going to run into trouble. It’s this jumble of competing stories that stop the film from being great and at times kills the momentum that it has been building.
The final third of the film is quite brilliant though. We get jarring tension, explosive action, satisfaction and sadness all rolled into one very exciting chunk. We’re left very glad we’re not a part of that world, in which it seems a normal functioning society is light years away.
