Trigger Warning

From the very first scene, it's clear that Netflix's new action thriller is going to be a painful story to get through, unfortunately. Two cars with wildly roaring terrorists somewhere in the Middle East are chasing Jessica Alba's character Parker (spec ops soldier) and her colleague Nick who, without much explanation, are trying to escape in what looks like a moving bus, in the middle of a chalk-white salt desert. The terrorists and their cars are painted there in all the zoomed-out full shots while Alba, in Chuck Norris' old Walker Texas Ranger glasses, holds the gun like it's a poisonous snake as she desperately tries to return the terrorists' CGI-based fire. The bus blows up. People die and it all ends in a knife fight where the choreography and deployed stuntman do their best to make Jessica Alba's waving of the sharpened carbon steel look believable, but it doesn't work much better (in terms of true realism) than when Vinnie Diesel wearing a white tank top and drainpipe denim ziplines across the UK in Fast 9.

When Alba's character Parker lands on home soil, it's clear that her old man has died back in the dirty old hometown and once she returns home, a conspiracy lurks, which of course means that the now retired special forces soldier must go on a villain hunt. We've all seen this film before, many times. The Chuck Norris-starring Lone Wolf told the same story of a special forces soldier returning home to 'clean up' as did The Rock debacle Walking Tall and the Statham film Homefront. The premise is so simple that everyone can follow along and the dialogue is often stupid and devoid of normal logic. Revenge must be carried out and in the process the whole town must be saved from the corrupt drug dealers, as is the case here. Alba's Parker is the brutal character while her naïve, slightly daft hometown sidekick Mike is the calm, friendly type.

Netflix never provided the review version of Trigger Warning which made it impossible to do a preview review before today's big premiere and now in retrospect I have no problem understanding why. Because this is one of the worst films of the year so far along with other Netflix productions such as Unfrosted, Under Paris and Atlas. The script in Trigger Warning was written primarily by the old man behind Catwoman with the assistance of The Last of Us: Part II co-writer Halley Wegryn Gross and it is in many ways the dumbest, laziest, flabbiest and most identity-poor piece of shit that has been filmed in recent years. There is really nothing of interest here. Parker is paper-thin as a character and her enemies are cartoonishly nonsensical and slimy in a way that makes the whole film breathe parody. The action sequences are also absolutely atrocious with stuntmen standing around waiting for a grimacing Alba to judo throw them at well-placed glass tables and the muzzle flashes and explosions during the firefights are all done in what I'm guessing is Microsoft Word.

It would be one thing if at least the cinematography, editing and sound effects/music had been of a decent standard here, but they're not. It's more like Trigger Warning looks like a really bad episode of a really cheap TV show, rather than a big Netflix production featuring Alba's big comeback. Because I usually like most of what she does. Into the Blue, Sin City, Awake. Alba is usually good, but even she wanders around in Trigger Warning via lousy characterisation, cluelessly looking for that proverbial straw. This... Is without a doubt one of the worst films of the year so far and it's about time Netflix got its act together and raised the bar.