Triple Nine

Synopsis: After a gang of Atlanta criminals pull off a bank robbery on the orders of the local Russian Mafia they think they are done but their bosses think otherwise.  

One might call Australian director John Hillcoat, like his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, a specialist in the aesthetics of violence.  In this respect he shares a certain communality with Quentin Tarantino but whereas the latter has a tongue-in-cheek, pop cultural form of delivery, as we have seen with his previous films, from his 1989 debut, Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead to 2012’s Lawless, Hillcoat favours a solemnly, even grimly, humourless approach that bespeaks an artist at work.

There’s not a whole lot of art in his latest film with which for the first time he quits the Antipodes for the American mainstream but it is still dourly, one wants to say, dystopianly, humourless in its depiction of the criminal underworld of modern-day Atlanta, Georgia.  As with all of Hillcoat’s films it is technically impressive and this time the budget is handsome, allowing not only for adrenaline-pumping action set-pieces but a top-drawer cast. 

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the script by Matt Cook manages to shoehorn enough standard issue action crime movie tropes into its complicated narrative to satisfy two or three average movies but hasn’t the dramatic coherence to sustain one good one. 

What do you want?  Good cops vs bad cops, a white cop vs a black cop (Casey Affleck and Anthony Mackie do duty for both), a world-weary drug-taking cop boss (Woody Harrelson), a military-trained gang boss (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a ruthless Russian Mafia boss (Kate Winslet, continuing her impressive series of heavily-disguised performances), a Michael Mann-ish bank robbery and freeway shootout, a Spike Lee-ish gangland war featuring heavily armed and tattooed Hispanics, topless lap dancers and point-blank executions are all rolled out.  And they’re just the devices that I clocked as I tried to decipher from the street-wise jive talk and the low-lit visuals who was doing what to whom and why in the intersecting story lines. (The film's only novel figures, a triple beheading and the blowing off of a security guard's foot in order to get his colleagues to comply would seem more suited to Tarantino at his most juvenile).

Chock-full of action and conflict (there are two sets of brotherly dynamics, one set of sisters and a discordant marriage) one could not say that Hillcoat’s film lacks pace, but beyond the intense forward momentum there is nothing substantial connecting the individual scenes, a fact which culminates in an ending which is near-incomprehensible. If not during the film then by that time most audiences will be asking themselves: Who are these people? Why are they doing what they are doing? And, most importantly of all, who cares?

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