Film Review: Triple 9

★★★☆☆

It’s corrupt copper/Russian mobster time in Hollywood’s latest cops vs. gangsters outing, with a stellar cast playing a high stakes game in the blistering heat of Atlanta. But does the last offering from John Hillcoat — director of The Road, Lawless and The Proposition — break free of the well-trodden heist movie clichés?

To a certain extent it does — although it would be a stretch to say that the film is successful overall, despite the clear talent at work behind, and in front of, the camera.

John Hillcoat is an extremely visual filmmaker, even going as far as creating a manual of photo prompts to help each of his cast get into character. Triple 9, staying faithful to this technique, takes on a distinctly red hue — from the opening minutes, the searing heat of Atlanta is reflected in the choices made on screen.

This film is set in the south, Hillcoat has pointed out — avoiding the blue tinge of East Coast-set cop dramas was a deliberate decision — and it does go a long way to force the audience to share in the stifling heat of both the location and the situations the characters grapple with.

Kate Winslet as a Russian mob wife might appear disconcerting at first — but once the audience allows her to step out of the wistful period drama mould that they’ve almost certainly created for her she is believable as the cruel and apparently emotionless Irina. She holds the film, as may be expected, breaking the cliché of mob leader easily — and then heading home to inexplicably bake in her kitchen.

It’s a good job, because there isn’t much else for women to do in Triple 9. Explicitly labelled as stupid but a “great beauty” by Irina in the opening minutes, Gal Godot’s Elena exists as a vehicle for sororal manipulation throughout. Every other woman stays safely at home, apparently just lounging in sexy sleepwear and waiting for their men to return from doing bad stuff elsewhere. The cop-gangster-heist genre is traditionally an extremely masculine one, which might go some way to explain this — but it doesn’t make our failure to distinguish the identikit pretty brunettes that hover in the background any less real.

Although it has a stellar ensemble cast — Aaron Paul, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson and Chiwetel Ejifor star alongside Winslet and Godot — Triple 9 ultimately fails to live up to the promises that it makes. It might have a woman calling the shots, but that’s where the originality ends and standard bad cop/heist fare takes over.

If you’re not a fan of this genre — hands up: I’m not — you’re likely to lose interest after the halfway mark. Attention flagging, I wasn’t invested in the character by the end — a shame, because it started well.

Triple 9 is out in UK cinemas now.

Originally published at https://www.thenationalstudent.com.