Triple Frontier

(★★★✩✩)

TRIPLE Frontier is a solid, engrossing genre item with designs on being something more. It doesn’t quite get there, but it does well enough along the way to make the journey worth taking.

Certainly, Frontier’s bona fides are in good order. It is directed by JC Chandor, whose last film was the superlative A Most Violent

Year, and its cast is top-lined by heavyweights like Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam and Garrett Hedlund.

Chandor also shares screenplay credit with Mark Boal (Oscar winner for Hurt

Locker), and film buffs who recognise his name as well as the film’s title will remember that almost a decade ago this project began as a solo script slated to be directed by Boal’s frequent collaborator Kathryn Bigelow.

Set in an unnamed area of Latin America (likely including Colombia) where the borders of three countries come together,

Frontier’s core story is a heist movie of the familiar “one last job” variety.

But instead of career criminals hoping to cash out, the protagonists are career specialforces operatives who gave the best years of their lives to their country and are now wondering why things post-service haven’t turned out better.

Though this is not new territory, it is for Chandor, and he and his expert team, including cinematographer Roman Vasyanov and editor Ron Patane, bring brisk, involving professionalism to the telling.

Like Seven Samurai, Frontier begins with the formation of a fighting unit, but unlike the Kurosawa film, which united strangers, this one details how former comrades in arms, each one with an apparently obligatory nickname, are persuaded to reunite.

More than half of Triple Frontier is devoted to the planning, execution and unexpected (isn’t it always) aftermath of that robbery.

Though there is a certain amount of contrivance and coincidence in the narrative, the action sequences are often surprising and always involving.

Also effective, though not to the extent that the film hopes for, is the working out of

Triple Frontier’s underlying themes of the nature of masculinity, the cost of violence and the corrosive effect of greed.

If those notions make you think of John Huston’s classic The Treasure Of The Sierra

Madre, it will not surprise you that that film was on director Chandor’s mind as well. The thematic results feel a bit pro forma here and do not involve us as much as the action does, but even making the attempt is worth applauding. – Kenneth Turan/Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service

Triple Frontier is now streaming on Netflix.