Triple Frontier

Triple Frontier (2019) is about five former special forces soldiers robbing a drug lord in South America. All of them have left the service and none is doing well: one gives property seminars, one fights, one has lost his flying licence. One is still working in the field and learns that hundreds of millions of dollars are inside the walls of a house. He assembles the team. The robbery is over halfway through. The real film is what follows: moving the money. The helicopter cannot lift the weight, the mountain pass is closed, there are not enough mules, and the road goes through villages. At every stage they have to reduce the load and nobody wants to. That is the idea: the robbery is easy, money corrupts, and weight is a real thing. J.C. Chandor directed and wrote it with Mark Boal. The project was in development for years and was attached at various points to other directors and actors; Netflix took it in the end. Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal star. That the soldiers were never compensated after their wars is a constant theme, used as the justification for the robbery, and the film does not examine it critically. The mountain section is the best part. The ending is deliberately cold. It runs 125 minutes. Good for: heist films, survival, and military drama. Less good for: the characters are thin, the politics is shallow, and the pace sags in the second half.