2 out of 5
Directed by: Jesse V. Johnson
Something… went awry here. From script to screen, it really feels like we’re getting a few different visions muddled together, and that combination is not a very satisfactory one, especially given what the surface presents us: late 2010s DTStreaming action-revivalist director Jesse V. Johnson presenting the big stars of that scene – Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White – alongside martial arts heavyweights like Iko Uwais, Tiger Chen, and Tony Jaa, behind a nonsense title and story (mercenaries versus assassins!) that screams at us that the upcoming 90 minutes will be a banger. And it kinda starts out that way, with White’s merc Devereaux leading a team including Payu (Jaa) and Long Fei (Chen) on a rescue mission in Thailand that’s all guns and explosions and bloody bullets, and that leaves villager Jaka (Uwais) alive and swearing revenge. Great! From there on out, though… awry.
The credited writers on Triple Threat – five on IMDB, with a separate screenplay from Dwayne Smith – seem to be a hodgepodge of folks who’d worked on semi-(then-)recent B-movies and Chinese / Asian productions, and with one Johnson compatriot in the mix: Stu Small. Johnson, who’d by this point developed a rather particular style one might call a brand, had come bundled with Small and editor Matthew Lorentz on the last few films; without knowing the production details behind Threat, the movie is experienced as a battle between that brand and a more complex thriller, crisscrossing allegiances between gangs and well-meaning humanitarians and highlighting the gray-stained motivations / morals of those alliances. One imagines one person signing on and the project morphing into something else, i.e. Johnson is attached, and the movie starts to shift into his usual 80s tribute of muscles and brawls, with an increasing focus on martial arts / stuntwork that, frankly, I don’t know he’s ever been great at highlighting, stuck moreso in the US 80s mode. But anyhow, this equates to that hugely stacked roster doing a lot of acting, and a disappointing amount of martial arts-ing. Much respect to their acting chops, of course, but Adkins and White seem to know the Jesse score – they are the one-note baddies – while the other side of the script is leaving room for Uwais and Jaa to bring some drama in. Lorentz doesn’t know what to do with this, leading to the most dreadfully laborious whiplashing between almost-action and extended dialogue, while d.p. Jonathan Hall got the note to stick with the orange and blue cinematic endemic, forgetting to light scenes in a constrasting way to actually highlight things, leading to some of the potentially more climactic moments falling flat in a wash of undefined one or the other color. Meanwhile, the plot that may have been sensible at one point is made stupid as shit by this approach, with some potential B-movie humor – that our badass mercs are kinda really bad at their job – lost via the tonal cross-cutting.
Our cast does save this thing. They’re charming, even when the edit doesn’t support what they’re trying to do, and though I have my gripes with Johnson’s / Lorentz’s way of presenting martial arts, we get a couple key scenes (a police station showdown; the ending scene) that have enough highlights to keep things moving along.
