Syria is nine hours ahead of New Mexico, where Trigger Warning’s small-town setting was shot. Noon in Damascus is 3 AM in Albuquerque. When could a New Mexican sheriff, in broad daylight, successfully call a special ops soldier—also in broad daylight, in the middle of the Syrian desert (which must have excellent cell service)—on her personal phone? As bonus credit, please identify all three war crimes committed by the heroes before the title card hits. I’m sorry to begin my review with a word problem, but this movie’s problems extend beyond its words. The veteran-comes-home revenger Trigger Warning is thoroughly idiotic and deathly slow, filled with so much ugly camp that it could stand in as the first Lifetime Original action movie.
But, really, Trigger Warning slots nicely into the tier below Netflix’s roster of fake blockbusters, beefing up its fake B-movie catalog with 100 minutes of half-hearted sleaze. The vehicles for this sleaze include that special ops soldier, Parker (Jessica Alba), and her high school ex, Sheriff Jesse (Mark Webber). Jesse ruptured the space-time continuum to give his old flame a call because her dad died in a cave-in and she needs to come sort out his affairs. She also needs to come sort out the affairs of Jesse’s family, led by his father, Senator Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall). With a name like that, you know Swann runs on a platform of “freedom, family, and faith” and has at least one good-for-nothing son. That’d be Jesse’s brother Elvis (Jake Weary), whose character traits are Racist and Mullet (one of which is the show-don’t-tell version of the other). Swann and his clan all but own Parker’s rundown hometown of Creation, nestled in Swann County.
As we can surmise from all this Scooby-Doo scene-setting, all is not well in Creation under the thumb of the Swanns. This is confirmed when Parker visits the scene of her dad’s death, deep in his literal man cave. Parker’s super-soldier skillset is mostly confined to stabbing folks with a knife, but this scene gives her one more ludicrous talent: She notices that one of the caved-in rocks bears the telltale markings (I guess) of being blown up by a grenade. Foul play is afoot, and Parker’s revenge tour begins in earnest.
Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya (making her English-language debut) never quite massages Trigger Warning into the neo-Western subgenre that so clearly inspired it—the one where a hardened veteran returns home to find their quaint town infested by crooks, their small-town values corrupted by greed and innocence brutalized by violence. We barely see Creation’s townsfolk, and the three screenwriters (John Brancato, Josh Olson, Halley Gross) keep switching up the stakes beyond the obvious Swann oligarchy. Parker’s vendetta is deeply personal, yet keeps slipping away from her monotone performance, the plodding action and the script’s sloppy ideas.
If Trigger Warning simply dealt with Parker’s relationship with the Swann clan—encompassing her past-and-present sexual relationship with Jesse, her longtime animosity with Elvis and her disdain for the powerful Ezekiel—it could find elegance in that straightforward structure. This is the film Webber thinks he’s in, one where Jesse’s psychosexual relationship with Parker informs all his choices and is a driving force of the movie. He tries to underplay his underwritten role, attempting to revert his middle-aged lawman back to his high school days whenever he softly speaks to her. But he’s alone out there, a lone chemical trying to spark a reaction. Jesse and Parker talk through each other, two whispery blanks who couldn’t burn for each other if they were having a Zoolander-style gasoline fight. Jesse comes off like a stunted little kid, and Parker comes off as a newly programmed robot.
But the movie tires of itself and its established villains quickly, moving its own goalposts to a new set of baddies: A group of domestic terrorists, purchasing stolen weapons from Elvis, as faceless as the Syrians Parker’s team were murdering earlier. As Parker starts killing, it becomes clear that, unlike so many movies with military heroes, Trigger Warning isn’t a rah-rah flag-waver. Army depot guys are selling to unscrupulous gunrunners in broad daylight, after all.
It’s actually a libertarian fantasy, filled with weed-growing, gun-toting, red-blooded Americans of all stripes. Everyone in Creation is armed to the teeth, pulling grenades out of junk drawers and high-caliber rifles from behind their bar tops. And Trigger Warning is absurdly unconcerned with mortality: For example, Parker calls in a lawyer, who is quickly murdered off-screen and never mentioned or thought of by anyone ever again. It’s always telling what films a movie embeds within itself; here, a character watches a clip of Chuck Norris’ revisionist Vietnam thriller Missing in Action 2: The Beginning.