‘Trigger Warning’ Review: Jessica Alba’s Knife-Happy Netflix Movie Proves Too Dull

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “trigger warning” as “a statement cautioning that content may be disturbing or upsetting.” Why Netflix borrowed the phrase for a revenge thriller where star Jessica Alba wields a knife as her weapon of choice 95 percent of the time is a bit puzzling, as it doesn’t even make any sense from a pun perspective. (Last I checked, knives don’t have triggers.) But, rest assured, there’s nothing here that is disturbing or upsetting. Now, boring? Yes, sadly, Trigger Warning can do boring.

See, the good thing about the streaming era of movie production is that a whole bunch of low-to-mid-budget, B-action movies (a genre I’m partial to) end up getting made either by or for the streamers, and some of them end up being quite fun. (Extraction hive, rise up!) There’s nothing better than cinematic action mayhem that’s elevated by invention and gumption more so than production budget. (One of Alba’s chief supporters, director Robert Rodriguez, who cast her in his films six times, used to know a lot about this.) The flip side to that coin, though, is that the ones that fail to capture that spark end up not serving much of a purpose other than getting thrown on the “disposable content” junk pile, maybe waiting for the Netflix viewer who fondly remembers tuning into that first season of Dark Angel to click play right before they start folding some laundry.

Which brings us back to Trigger Warning, a film that, on paper, you want to root for. It’s from Thunder Road Films, the production house that gave us the John Wick franchise and blessed us with the excellent Monkey Man earlier this year. And it was directed by Indonesian director Mouly Surya (Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts), making her foray into a genre that could use more women directors. Unfortunately, the end result is the end result, and Trigger Warning will be lucky to compel viewers to make it to the end of that basket of underwear before they flip to something else, let alone re-establish Alba as a star who can carry action movies like, say, Charlize Theron has been doing for the last 10 years.

What Is ‘Trigger Warning’ About?

In Trigger Warning, Alba plays Parker, some sort of CIA agent who’s typically involved with battling anti-American forces on the other side of the world. The movie is a little vague about what exactly her job is. One character describes it as “killing terrorists and doing spy shit,” while she merely characterizes it as getting into “shenanigans.” After an opening sequence that lays out that she can be a badass when necessary, Parker is called back home when her father suddenly dies in a mine collapse. At first, she thinks it was an accident, even if the local sheriff, an old boyfriend of hers named Jesse (Mark Webber), is pushing a theory that her old man committed suicide. Before long, however, Parker begins to suspect that neither is true, and that her dad may have been murdered after getting tangled up in some kind of weapons-selling scheme involving Jesse’s obnoxious, redneck brother Elvis (Jake Weary), and their slimy father, a U.S. Senator played by Anthony Michael Hall. The movie finds her tearing through the town to discover the truth and take down anyone who might have been responsible for the death of her beloved “pops.” (By the way, you could play a drinking game where you do a shot every time Alba says “pops” in this movie, but you’d be dead by the 45-minute mark. So I’d advise against it.)

There are some problems here. For one, the “town,” as it were, might as well not exist in Trigger Warning, as far as the viewer is concerned. There’s the mine, a bar that “pops” owned, a house or two, and maybe eight or 10 people total. The movie was shot in New Mexico, so we’ll say it takes place there, but there’s nothing here that really gives the movie a compelling sense of place. Nor are any of the characters the least bit interesting. Alba isn’t able to imbue her character with enough mystique to serve as an engaging action lead. Jesse ends up back in bed with Parker at one point, but Alba and Webber have so little chemistry you might not even notice. There’s another bearded guy who I spent the first 45 minutes getting confused with Jesse. And Hall is given little to do but talk about how he believes in “freedom, family, and faith” and wonder how “Latinx” should be pronounced. (The movie feints at taking jabs at racist, conservation politicians but throws no real punches in that direction.) Comedian Tone Bell plays Spider, a hacker colleague of Parker’s, and it seems like watching him might be some fun. But, unfortunately, he’s relegated to only a few scenes at the beginning and end of the film.

‘Trigger Warning’s Action Sequences Fall Short

That leaves the action scenes — the lifeblood of any film in this genre — and I’m sorry to report those aren’t any more impressive than the rest of Trigger Warning. Alba looks like she might have gone through knife training for a week or two, but the fights aren’t staged with any real creativity and don’t feel the least bit tactile. In fact, most of the heavy lifting in them is done by the generic “knife slashing” noises that the sound-editing team had to layer in to an almost obnoxious degree. There are a few brief glimpses of what could have been, including a sequence where Parker momentarily wields a broom and some hedge trimmers as weapons and another in a burning bar where Parker battles a thug on a balcony overtop of a flame-engulfed first floor. The cool bits of both of these sequences could be counted in seconds as opposed to minutes. Nothing else seems capable of raising the viewer’s pulse much, despite the bombastic music on the soundtrack continually insisting that some truly epic stuff is going down.

There’s a point late in the film where Alba is on the hunt for some weapons and lovingly eyeballs a particular machete. She picks it up and twirls it around a few times, her silhouette against the setting sun. It’s supposed to feel like a “let’s fucking go” moment. But, in Trigger Warning, there’s nowhere for Alba to go — no notable battles to fight, nor an interesting war to win. And what we’re left with is just another disposable action movie, dropped indiscriminately on a streaming service to sit among all the others. Some of those prove to be great fun (even if they’re of the “guilty pleasure” variety). But Trigger Warning? Not so much. In a movie with so much blade work, what ends up on screen needed to be much, much sharper.

Trigger Warning is now streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

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