TRIGGER WARNING is a b-action vehicle for Jessica Alba (MACHETE, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION). You don’t see her in big movies anymore but she looks basically the same as you remember and she’s playing a CIA covert ops badass whose father dies, so she comes home to her small town, uncovers a criminal conspiracy and fucks up some motherfuckers.

When I saw the trailer I was thinking it was like how Netflix gave tough lady action vehicles to Allison Janney and Halle Berry and different people. But then it opens with a war scene in Syria and I thought oh no, this is more like a recent made-for-VOD movie that Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke would each have a couple scenes in. That’s the general feel of the thing, and storywise it’s all well-worn tropes, very low on original spins. It’s generic – all the numbers are there, all in order – but slightly above average for this sort of thing. Alba seems very dedicated and is cool in it, so at the bare minimum level of “is it a movie where Jessica Alba beats up a bunch of chumps?” it is successful.

Like most low budget action movie combat-experience-in-the-Middle-East prologues, this one is pretty wack. Just out in the middle of a blank desert, nothing exciting about it, but at least Alba’s character Parker doesn’t have a traumatic incident to flash back to later, and does establish her character’s relative heroism by tackling another soldier before he can execute their prisoners. (To her non-credit she frames it as strategic rather than moral.) Then she gets a call from her high school boyfriend Jesse Swann (Mark Webber, BOMB THE SYSTEM), now the sheriff of her home town of Creation, New Mexico, who tells her her “pops” died in a mine cave-in.

She goes home to, she says, sell her dad’s bar Maria’s, but you know how that goes. While brooding there she almost kills who she thinks is an intruder, but actually it’s bar employee Mike (Gabriel Basso, the defendant in JUROR #2) who came to feed the lizard that lives in the bar. Wacky pet generally earns flair points in my calculations, but this one only gets half a point because you barely ever see the thing.

There’s some pretty good humor and momentum in the way it cuts from scene to scene. I like when she’s showing Mike sympathy for having found the body and then abruptly jumps to asking him to show her where. Then she shocks him again by, without warning, tossing a grenade to demonstrate that one of those had to have caused the marks on the rocks in the cave-in.

By the way, as much as I hate the word “mancave,” it’s pretty good that her dad’s was literal. There’s a record player, a film projector, a print of MISSING IN ACTION 2: THE BEGINNING. Wouldn’t be my choice, but film prints are hard to come by, maybe it wasn’t his either.

I like that she kinda relives her youth while in town – lots of drinking and smoking weed, hanging out with old friends, she even has to ride a bike at one point. But all in between sneaking into places to spy on crimes and shit, which she probly didn’t do as much back in the day.

I didn’t realize at first that ex-boyfriend sheriff is also the brother of sleazy sexual harasser and arms dealer Elvis Swann (Jake Weary, ZOMBEAVERS, MESSAGE FROM THE KING) and son of even sleazier senator running for re-election Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall, WEIRD SCIENCE). Sometimes a simple plot can still be hard to follow. There’s an arms deal being made with a right wing terrorist named Ghost (Kaiwi Lyman, COPSHOP), the money is funding the political campaign – always such big time crime and corruption in these small time towns. All thanks to the dark web. I hate the dark web.

But Parker is on the case. She has the ol’ fiercely loyal CIA hacker friend she calls to break into databases and find out shit for her, and I appreciate that he’s not a comic relief nerd, he’s a cool deep-voiced no-nonsense guy named Spider (Tone Bell, Richard Pryor on American Soul). Their friendship definitely adds value. I also like the parts where she’s at the bar when it’s open – she feels comfortable going behind the bar to refill her pitcher and giving beers to customers, so you know she’s actually worked there.

Leaving the bar one night she notices some suspicious dudes in the parking lot have a machine gun in their car, so she makes Mike follow them. I like when she’s tying her hair back as she tells him now he can call Jesse so he realizes yep, she’s seriously about to jump out and intervene with an armed robbery. This is the best fight – it’s in a hardware store and there’s a Jackie-Chan-level attention to incorporating props: clanging heads on hanging pans, flipping people into display cases. When a guy comes at her with a chainsaw she wraps a leather apron around the blade, yanks it out of his hands, swings it at him like a blackjack. My favorite is the push broom – she uses it to knock the uzi out of the guy’s hand, then hooks it behind his neck, then kicks him! I think it’s a double, but it’s awesome.

If I understand correctly this robbery ties in to the trail she’s following, but it wouldn’t need to. I’m a fan of unrelated side quests where the hero thwarts a robbery (HARD TO KILL being the Platonic ideal).

About the title. Seems like it would be making some kind of point, considering the culture war connotation of the term, but no, I don’t think so. Not even sure what it refers to. There are guns in it. I don’t know. But it was the title when it sold as a spec script by Josh Olson (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE) and John Brancato (MINDWARP, THE GAME, TERMINATOR 3, CATWOMAN). At the time Deadline described it as “a female FIRST BLOOD with JOHN WICK thrown in for good measure, where the reluctant heroine reveals herself in a small town.” (So I assume her special set of skills was a secret in that draft?) At the time, production company Thunder Road had just finished JOHN WICK CHAPTER 2 and was working on SICARIO 2, so that’s how many WICKs ago it was. In 2020 Netflix bought it and hired Indonesian director Mouly Surya (MARLINA THE MURDERER IN FOUR ACTS). Rewrites were done by Halley Gross (The Last of Us Part II, the video game), and it was shot in 2021, but didn’t come out until this summer.

I vaguely recall Olson mentioning it at some point on his podcast The Movies That Made Me, but I don’t think he said anything specific. I tried to find if he’d done any interviews about it, and instead found that a “nü-metal musician/poet/writer” named Otep Shamaya claims it started as an adaptation of her short story “The Older Woman” that they were writing together, but then he ghosted her and refused to give her credit. In a video she says the story is different but that it’s her character, so I would speculate that Olson believes he went in a different direction that wasn’t the same project anymore, but also I can imagine I’d be upset if what she describes happened to me. (There seems to be a lawsuit about it.)

It’s not fair at all to compare it to JOHN WICK, it’s not on that level, but the action is well done and in fact handled by 87Eleven guys. Stunt coordinator/second unit director is Justin Yu (MISS BALA, ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS, DAY SHIFT, JAWAN, THE KILLER’S GAME), fight coordinator is Eric Brown (HOTEL ARTEMIS, BRUISED, CREED III), and Alba’s stunt double is Bethany Curry (JACKASS FOREVER, REBEL MOON: PART ONE – A CHILD OF FIRE, FLIGHT RISK). As far as the lower tier of movie star action (below Keanu – not an insult), Alba acquits herself well and looks cool running, sneaking, jumping over walls and fighting. So I award TRIGGER WARNING the prestigious Outlaw Vern “It’s okay, I sort of liked it” rating.