Sometimes you want to settle down to the sit and brilliance of the Coen brothers. Sometimes you want to dive back into a comforting horror favourite. Sometimes you have some laughs with Buster Keaton. Cinema is there for you, whatever you want to do. Even if you want to spend over half of your waking day with someone like Lav Diaz or Béla Tarr. And sometimes you just want to watch skilled people kick each other in the face. If you're in the mood for the latter, Triple Threat is an option for you.
Directed by Jesse V. Johnson (who has helmed a number of enjoyable action flicks, one of the best being Accident Man), this is the tale of some people with big guns raiding a prisoner encampment in Thailand to free prisoners. The mission is a cover, however, and the people actually want to free their criminal leader, Collins (Scott Adkins). Once free, his group are then out to kill Tian Xiao Xian (Celina Jade), a wealthy woman who wants to use her wealth to battle corruption and crime. One thing leads to another, enemies become allies, people are used as bait, and the film eventually becomes a battle between one team (Adkins, Michael Jai White, Michael Bisping, and Jeeja Yanin) and another (Xiao Xian, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, and Tiger Chen).
Based on an idea by Chen, developing a movie that didn't come to fruition, this was then written by Joey O'Bryan, with Fangjin Song, Jian Huang, Sheldon Pang, and Lei Yan all credited as co-writers, as well as some additional work from Paul Staheli, it's amazing to think a) that so many people worked on the script for this, and b) this was the best they could come up with. Because this is a mess in places, with the first half moving between flashbacks and different moments that have no feeling of just how much time has passed. What could have been a decent framework, with the opening salvo, betrayals, and seemingly fluid loyalties, is instead turned into something that feels burdensome to a film that should have stripped everything else back in favour of making the most of the action stars in the cast.
Thankfully, the action/fight scenes are worth your time. Jaa, Chen, and Uwais may be relative superstars to those who want full-on fights that look as if they were put together with blood, sweat, and tears, but Adkins and White are no layabouts, and both of them are easy favourites of mine when it comes to modern action movies of this ilk (both having great presence AND the appearance of being able to handle themselves against crowds of unwitting henchmen). Bisping and Yanin are the lesser-known names, but both do well, and Jade is perfectly okay as the woman who finds herself in the middle of an absolute maelstrom of gunfire and hand to hand combat.
The cast list alone will be enough to attract anyone hankering for some enjoyable action that goes a step or two beyond what you would see in most glossy blockbusters, and there's enough here to justify choosing this for a weekend watch. It's just a shame that the non-fight scenes are so bad. That's something you can say about many action movies, and it's something that action movie fans are happy to put up with while they are at least getting GREAT fights, but I still think that this particular assembled cast could have been better served by a script that figured out how to pack in even more stuntwork within a much flimsier connective storyline.
Good stuff, but feel free to ask anyone (including myself) for better films that feature any of these stars doing what they do best. I guarantee you that asking the right people will get you at least 20 recommendations of films much better than this. At least.
6/10
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