What’s it about?
Under a city’s dark underbelly, the Russian mob extort a crew of ex-military into an impossible bank heist. Everything goes right, until everything goes wrong.
What did we think?
Stephen Scott says: Even with 90 minutes of jaw-clenching unnervingness and 25 minutes of smouldering acting there’s just one small problem. There’s no actual ending. There’s a plot, some twists, but no resolution. You leave the cinema with a feeling of dread.
If you’re happy to watch a movie filled to the brim with tension but no resolution, go see it. Otherwise you should …
SEE? See what I mean?
The above review is a distillation of this far longer, more profanity-filled review. Enjoy.
Atlanta has a dark underbelly buried deep below its dark underbelly. So dark is this world, everyone speaks like Batman. Even the women.
Here the Latinos can only be identified by their outrageous accents, thanks to layers of tattoos so dense, it’s hard to spot the racial stereotype beneath.
Identifying bully boys in the Russian mafia is just as complex: are they the thug-like goons donning kippah? OK, this one was a little easier.
Then there’s the central axis point of this thriller: the band of brothers forged in the unrelenting military action of the Gulf Wars.
Returned soldiers who take their precision skills and apply them where they are most appropriate: tackling heists so impossible the police and FBI are confounded.
Except for the fact they’re in on it.
Triple 9 is 90 minutes of jaw-clenching unnervingness and 25 minutes of smouldering acting and character development that make the unnerving bits far more grim.
This gritty film is jam-packed with incredibly qualified actors, action sequences that thrill like knuckle-busting roller coasters, and a darkly rumbling impending sense of doom … but there’s a teeny, tiny problem: there’s no fucking point.
There’s a plot, but it’s more akin to mixing great actors with terrific technical abilities, and forgetting that a script usually has an ending.
For while there was an abundance of tension, there was a equal and opposite dearth of resolution.
Why was this movie made?
To make you realise the journey is more important than the destination? Does a movie really need an ending?
Or was it to confound its audience, leaving them hanging with an overbearing sense of pointlessness and despair?
It’s like The Usual Suspects without the genius twist that was Keyser Söze.
The only thing revealed in Triple 9 was that it wasted two hours of my time.
How much money was spent on this movie when they couldn’t even afford a fucking ending?