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Feb 26, 2016 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

Following a botched heist, a crew of professional bank robbers find themselves indebted to a vicious Russian mob boss. Their task: stealing sensitive documents from a Homeland Security facility. The only way they can pull it off is if every cop in the city is somewhere else. And nothing draws live cops like a dead one.

In some not-too-distant alternate universe, Triple 9 is one of the underrated gems of 2016. It’s got some stylish visuals, a pulpy, high-concept premise and an ensemble cast that would seem more appropriate for a prestige drama than a gritty cops-and-robbers shoot-em-up. Just listen to some of these character/actor pairings: Chiwetel Ejiofor as a black ops soldier turned desperate criminal. Casey Affleck an honest detective targeted for assassination. Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus as a pair of bank-robbing brothers. Kate Winslet (Kate Winslet!) as an ice cold, platinum haired Russian mob boss whose introductory scene finds her tossing a bag of bloody teeth into a car trunk full of her soon to be victims. Woody Harrelson as…well, Woody Harrelson. It’s a testament to how out of depth the screenwriter and, to a lesser degree, the director are that the film manages to do so little with so impressive a cast.

Triple 9 is another entry in director John Hillcoat’s career-long exploration of the ever-shifting loyalties between violent men. Although the film never matches the gorgeous lyricism of his best film—the brutal 2005 Western, The Proposition—Hillcoat has not lost his flair for arresting images and tightly-wound action scenes, best showcased in the film’s opening bank robbery gone wrong. What he cannot overcome is a script that is simultaneously overreaching in its ambition and superficial in its details. A former Black List entry written by Matt Cook, the script is not shy about its influences, recalling half a dozen cop dramas from the past few decades, most prominently Heat and Training Day. While clichés are the vehicles of almost every genre piece, good or bad, Triple 9 swiftly becomes a multi-car pile-up that will have even the least savvy of viewers predicting plot twists long before they happen. The film’s busy-ness is made all the more exhausting by how banal it is. The characters lack motivation, the dialogue is flat and the film spends too much time jumping between characters for any of them to register as more than ciphers. With eight principal characters, major narrative threads that don’t intersect until the final act, and talented actors wasted in parts that feel underwritten or edited down to cameos, Triple 9 would have had a much greater chance of success as a season of a cable drama than as a two-hour film. Especially if they can keep the cast.

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Author rating: 3.5/10