Triple Frontier: An Unpatriotic War

If you know me well, you’ll know that there are few things I like more than a little bit of over-analysis – especially when it comes to mediocre movies. Triple Frontier is a film that certainly has deficiencies, but I believe there’s more to this new Netflix original than meets the eye. Read on for all my outlandish thoughts, notions and wild beliefs… Spoilers ahead (if you really care).

***

“Just as broken clocks have their moments of accuracy, even the most gifted directors occasionally offer up disappointments.” This is how one critic sensationally branded Triple Frontier, the newest film from American director, J.C. Chandor.

For those unfamiliar with his past work, Chandor achieved notoriety for his 2014 crime thriller, A Most Violent Year. Unlike his earlier film, Triple Frontier’s release was largely met with critical indifference. Probably hindered by its status as “just another Netflix original”, the film did at least enjoy a one-week run at a small number of cinemas.

Chandor’s latest cinematic venture is a strange one. Both original and gimmicky, intelligent and clumsy, cliched and skilfully well-shot, Triple Frontier perplexed me in the same way it did many others who watched it.

Populated by an A-list array of actors including Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro Pascal, Garret Hedlund and the perpetually washed-up former Batman-star, Ben Affleck, Triple Frontier clearly isn’t lacking in the casting department.

I watched the film just days after its Netflix release and, like many, didn’t think a huge amount of it. But it played on my mind for weeks until I finally decided to write up my reasons about why Triple Frontier is actually a good film that brings plenty to the table.

But first, some context. Oscar Isaac, who plays Pope in the movie, is a special forces operative who has spent years trying to take out Lorea, a drug lord who he soon discovers is in hiding close to the Triple Frontier, a stretch of tri-border land made up by the national boundaries between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina.

In his quest to find and defeat Lorea, Pope goes to great lengths to reunite his former team, played by the A-Listers I mentioned previously, and get them to join him in his pursuit.

This is probably starting to sound all too familiar, but this is just where the film starts to get interesting. There’s one thing that everyone in the team desperately wants and there’s one thing that Lorea definitely has – lots of money.

If there’s one thing that Triple Frontier does really well, it’s finding a balance between a fun action film and a detailed social commentary on the value of human life and the corruptibility of innocence.

An Unpatriotic War

The film begins with Charlie Hunnam’s character Frank Miller, a retired US operative, giving a speech to a group of young US special forces operatives. He talks about how he found returning to civilian life difficult. Citing a moment when he assaulted a man in a supermarket, he says, “The effects of committing extreme violence on other human beings are biological and physiological. That’s the price of being a warrior.” This amazingly bewildering scene is followed by a transition to Pope in a helicopter listening to Metallica – For Whom the Bell Tolls.

For me, this whole section is loaded in symbolism. First of all, the line “The effects of committing extreme violence on other human beings are biological and physiological” implies that the film acknowledges the 21st-century western outlook that warfare is both traumatic and mentally debilitating. However, this is immediately undercut by the following line, “That’s the price of being a warrior” which goes against the former implication in suggesting that this is a film that will be no different from the norm – another senseless action thriller.

Additionally, while the Metallica song may sound just like any another random rock song, it actually refers to Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which tells the story of a young American attached to a Republican guerrilla outfit during the Spanish Civil War. Among the many distinct themes of the book, one of Hemingway’s main explorations concerns the loss of innocence during warfare. This is precisely what plagues Chandor’s characters in Triple Frontier.

In another of Frank’s didactic speeches, later on, he says to the young marines: “I never had a feeling as pure or proud as completing a mission with the US flag on my shoulder.” Charlie Hunnam’s character is extremely preoccupied with the pride and glory of his former, legitimate exploits, and the character essentially uses those exploits to justify the illegitimate ones he is about to undertake.

All the characters share the patriotism expressed by Frank, but all of them also share the same avarice and greed expressed by Pope. This is because all the men are downtrodden and down on their luck. Again, the film reaches out of its comfort zone, here, in a tentative attempt to express how poorly military veterans are treated by the US government.

With all the men onside, Pope then flies the team out to the Triple Frontier. Their journey is accompanied by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle”, a clear reference to the 1970s Vietnam war films such as Apocalypse Now & The Deer Hunter. But before this track is finished, the song fades out to what the films’ subtitles poetically call “ominous instrumental music”. This suggests that the men have no prior frame of reference for the lawless acts they are about to commit – their futures are alien and unlike anything experienced previously.

The thin hint of legitimacy that renders Pope’s mission at all morally acceptable is his pursuit of the kingpin Lorea. So, when Lorea is anticlimactically killed within 58 minutes, the team slowly begin to descend into ethical obscurity and moral ambiguity.

Lorea is Triple Frontier’s archetypal ‘bad guy’, except he is only on-scene for a few seconds while he is shot multiple times by Pope. With the death of this archetypal ‘bad guy’, the film then requires new villains, and naturally, those villains are the characters that are subsequently doing the most amount of wrong, the very heroes we’ve been watching for the best part of an hour.

Stealing exactly a quarter of a billion dollars from Lorea, our anti-heroes then spend the remainder of the film trying to secure their bounty by taking it over the Andes to the Pacific coast. Gradually losing any sense of patriotism, pride and kinship, the group are forced by their own avarice into carrying out a number of murderous, heinous acts such as massacring the inhabitants of a small rural village.

The village scene is genuinely deplorable and it signifies the transition of the characters from anti-heroes to borderline villains. Check out the video below to hear Chandor talk about how he shot the scene.

In reference to this massacre, Pope says: “We’ve got to watch ourselves, here.” In any other action movie, this line would be in reference to the team’s clandestine strategy, in this film however, it references the team’s need to watch their own actions and their own loss of a moral compass.

The team eventually benefit from their exploits in Latin America, but not in a material sense. Instead of improving their financial situations, they get the realisation that no amount of money is worth dismissing your own ethical code.

In the wider context of US military activity, it’s worth remembering that the film mirrors an unfamiliar American landscape that is more preoccupied with isolationism and introspection than it is in overseas conflicts & foreign wars.

This is an unpatriotic war for an unpatriotic time and a welcome break from a seemingly unerring era of beige action movies that only aim to promote a self-righteous, patriotic agenda. Generally speaking, the film represents the need for morality over conquest, virtue over vice and decency over tyranny.

The Triple Frontier

The Triple Frontier denotes three different things: the physical borders of three areas, the ideological boundaries of three nations and the metaphorical frontier that exists between what is right and what is wrong.

It is all of these frontiers that the team cross during the course of the film, but it is the latter in which they must negotiate with the most aptitude.

Finally, Benjamin Lee in The Guardian claims that the film is “without any commentary or real depth”, it is this assertion which I would most like to refute. As strange as it is to say, Chandor’s Triple Frontier is an intelligent war movie that, while perhaps lacking real depth, does champion more than a few social commentaries.

It could easily be argued that the film’s ideas and central observations are half-baked and half-hearted, but at heart, the film does have a level of detail that many others like it often lack.

***

Now, on a lighter note, this film had two of my all-time favourite actors in it – Pedro Pascal & Oscar Isaac. If nothing else, I’m glad this film brought these two together again to make this beautiful short video with Wired.