Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trigger Warning’ on Netflix, a Rock-Solid Actioner Headlined by a Game Jessica Alba

Remember Jessica Alba? Trigger Warning, the actress’ new vehicle for Netflix, is her highest-profile project in the last decade or so. And it’s not too far removed from one of her career-defining projects, the James Cameron-created TV series Dark Angel, which ran for two seasons beginning in… 2000? That was a long time ago, wasn’t it? We also remember her from films like Honey, Into the Blue, Sin City, Fantastic Four and, uh, Good Luck Chuck – but more recently, she’s popped up in a few low-budget movies nobody saw and the short-lived series L.A.’s Finest, a relative obscurity despite being a spinoff of the Bad Boys movies. Trigger Warning gives her the opportunity to return to kicking ass, under the eye of talented Indonesian director Mouly Surya, and I’ll say this much: It’s way better than those crappy Jennifer Lopez action movies Netflix has been urping out. 

TRIGGER WARNING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with one of those hilarious subtitles: OPERATION ALICE 116, BADIYAT AL-SHAM DESERT, SYRIA. This is very important information. You wouldn’t want to get this confused with OPERATION ALICE 115, you know. Anyway, what happens out in the desert has jack-squat to do with the plot, but it at least shows us that Parker (Alba), who’s some kind of MERC or OPS, is one hell of a knife-wielding soldier-warrior. She takes out the bad guys and stops a rogue compadre from executing the prisoners – and then gets awful news. Her father. He was in a mining cave back in her dusty desert hometown of Creation, in the state of – well, they don’t mention that. Looks like Arizona, maybe New Mexico. But I’m pretty sure Creation is just up the road a stretch from Hellentarnation, Texas. But her dad. The cave collapsed. He’s gone. She’s devastated. He’s all she had, it seems.

Parker treks back home to mourn and take care of things. She sits down with Sheriff Jesse (Mark Webber), who very delicately states that they haven’t ruled out suicide. Red flag: Parker doesn’t believe that for a second. She heads back to the bar he owned, finds a bottle, takes a long pull. She nearly murders her pal Mikey (Gabriel Basso), a local stoner who helped her dad take care of the property, when he enters the building. This lady’s lethal, boy. She goes out for a beer and runs into Elvis Swann (Jake Weary), a good ol’ boy who’s Sheriff Jesse’s brother, and son of Senator Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall), who’s running for re-election on the god-guns-Americuh ticket. Elvis puts a hand on Parker and he’s lucky he got the damn thing back. 

We don’t even have to be in the room to understand that Elvis and his paw smell like wet and moldy prairie dog shit. One look at these guys and you’re jumping to the conclusion that Parker’s daddy saw too much of something dirty and the Swann boys prolly did something about it, and of course they just f—ed with the wrong father of a lethal-ass MERC or OPS. I’m not saying that’s how this plot plays out, but I’m not not saying it, either, and besides, it’s what we’re all thinking already, because we’ve seen a movie or two or 20 or 350, and we’re no dummies. 

Anyhow, Parker notices some local thugs have a machine gun (don’t worry, she whups their cans into next week) and then she spots Elvis out on the range playing with a got damn ROCKET LAUNCHER. “Are they just giving out military weapons now?” Parker says to herself, and this is when we politely inform her uh bro this is America, you can buy this stuff at Wal Mart now, about 12 minutes before the script makes the same joke. Now, just because we’re a step ahead of all this doesn’t mean the movie isn’t entertaining. In fact, we’re having fun in spite of that, and the fact that some of these grubby White-boy characters all look the same with their beards and near-mullets, and we sometimes get them confused. Doesn’t matter. We’re here to watch Alba put her big knife in ’em, and put her big knife in ’em, she does.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Trigger Warning brought to mind the rock-solid Frank Grillo Netflix action-thriller Point Blank, which also painted by numbers but was nonetheless entertaining, boasting a convincing performance from its lead actor and some savvy direction. (Note to producers: Put Grillo and Alba in an actioner together. It’d be electric I tell you, electric!) It also plays out a bit like a season of Justified condensed down to 100 minutes. Oh, and when Alba gets her hands on a machete, it made me think about how she starred in that one movie. What was it called again? Right – Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Performance Worth Watching: This isn’t the beginning of Alba’s Oscar campaign, but it’s good to see her in fighting form, convincingly exercising a little toughness and emotion while carrying a slightly-better-than-average action picture.

Memorable Dialogue: Mikey has questions:

Mikey: Are you a spy?

Parker: No. I’m not a spy. No.

Mikey: Just what a spy would say. What do you do for the government?

Parker: Shenanigans.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I’ll say this: Trigger Warning plays like something Robert Rodriguez would’ve directed in 2002. And if Robert Rodriguez would’ve directed it in 2024, it probably would have been forgettably bad instead of somewhat forgettably good. (What can I say, the guy’s been off his game for a while now.) Surya and Alba are a modestly formidable team, working through the screenplay’s myriad cliches and plausibility issues with a little style and panache. The director ably choreographs chases, shootouts, knife fights and fisticuffs without leaning too heavily on CG, and the star takes the material seriously until she doesn’t have to, bringing it to the brink of poker-faced intensity before stepping back and delivering a little glance or quip that acknowledges how silly all of this can be. I’d wager Alba studied the action stars of the ’80s in order to execute a winking performance without actually winking (just don’t expect too many he’s-dead-tired/yippee-ki-yay one-liners, perhaps unfortunately).

Look, this is no masterpiece, but when your expectations are sub-modest and a movie delivers significantly more kinetic and coherent action than your average rent-a-star direct-to-VOD title, and doesn’t come with the baggage of a mega-budget over-the-top-er — well, it makes a body feel tickled. Add in a not-unwelcome toplining performance from a very game Alba (anybody else feel like her return to relative prominence is overdue?), and you’ve got yourself 100 minutes of perfectly enjoyable in-the-moment entertainment that – despite the presence of a morally malfeasant righty-tighty politician as an antagonist – isn’t really “about” anything but watching a star flex a bit of charisma. 

Our Call: Pull the trigger, baby! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.