Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Special Forces officer Parker (Jessica Alba) is busy killing terrorists in the Syrian desert when she gets a call informing her of her father’s passing in a mine collapse back home in her American town. While prima facie the death looks like an accident, Parker notices something that points towards foul play. The 2024 Netflix film “Trigger Warning” is an action-thriller about a daughter trying to find the truth about her father’s death, going after his potential killers, and clearing out corrupt criminals from her hometown.
Jessica Alba leads this John Wick-style action-thriller, whose plot is so formulaic and flat that it manages to be mildly entertaining only due to its one novel ingredient – it features a woman of color kicking white men’s butts. Thanks to the mines, machine guns, and AK47s, viewers will also be reminded of the Rambo films. Alba’s Parker is a spontaneous one-person army who takes on half a dozen men like they are tiny chickens clucking around. It’s quite thrilling to watch her beating or saving men throughout “Trigger Warning,” and the writers even rub it in with a scene where Parker rescues her friend Spider (Tone Bell) and calls him a “damsel.”
Some of the action choreography is fun, especially a scene where Parker fights a bunch of petty thieves trying to rob a store, and they all use items from around the shop, including a chainsaw, which has a very “Evil Dead” flavor. However, the combat sequences in the second half of “Trigger Warning,” especially in the climactic confrontations, are lackluster and forgettable. Jessica Alba is just about convincing as the agile killer Parker, and doesn’t add any zest to the one-dimensional protagonist. The fact that Parker’s rivals are generic dumb, trigger-happy, entitled, privileged brats, doesn’t help much either.
“Trigger Warning” aims to be an emotionally charged film about a daughter avenging her father’s death, but it fails to set up any relatable father-daughter moments to care about Parker’s filial instincts. On top of that, her first instinct after coming back home for her father’s funeral is to decide to sell all his properties, so she doesn’t have any emotional attachment to her place. This makes the whole trope of “hero comes back home to clean it up” feel hollow. Jessica Alba should consider doing a “Resident Evil” style Zombie movie next, where she decapitates zombies and bad men.
Overall, “Trigger Warning” is a decent one-time watch if you are looking for a simple action flick about a military woman giving the bad boys in her town a good thrashing.
Stream the film on Netflix.
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