Triple Threat (2019)

When I saw this was on Netflix, and I saw all the names involved, I had to make it happen. How could this not be good, right? Our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has also covered this, so you can go to his site to see what he said.

Triple Threat has Michael Jai White as a bad mercenary who leads a team, including Tiger Chen, Tony Jaa, and Michael Bisping, on a raid in a small Thai village to free their leader, Scott Adkins, from a secret service prison they were holding him in. In the process, Iko Uwais's girlfriend is killed, and he wants revenge. Also, White, Adkins, and Bisping turn on Jaa and Chen, so they want revenge too. Seems like a natural fit that Jaa and Chen would team up with Uwais, but Uwais doesn't trust them, so he gets them arrested, then busts them out at the same time White and Adkins go to bust them out. Oh, and a Chinese heiress and businesswoman gets involved, and Jaa and Chen have to protect her, and then the mercenaries are in trouble, because they were supposed to kill the heiress, and if they don't, they get killed. Through all that, will the good guys win?

Where do I go with this? It's 96 minutes long, which should be a good number, but with the prodigious cast where we want to let everyone shine, and still have a big, unfolding plot, there's not a lot of room for everything we need. There were some great fights, but some didn't quite give us what we needed. After Uwais and Chen get after it in an underground fight ring at the beginning, and Uwais joins Jaa and Chen at their place after, I was thinking this was going to be these three unleashed, chasing down the baddies for revenge, bar fights, outdoor market fights, fights wherever we can get them. When Uwais gets Jaa and Chen arrested though, we lose that, and while what we get wasn't bad, it ended up being something that was hard to fit everything in. Like Thanksgiving, I got the turkey, the stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls, vegetables, maybe a stuffed acorn squash, then apple pie and pumpkin pie--next thing you know, you're full in 15 minutes and all of that ends up as leftovers, except with a movie, you can't have leftovers, you've only got those 96 minutes to make it work. As much as I hate to say it, I could've done this on turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes with gravy all over it. Leave the rest and let me take a nap after.

The thing is, revenge for killing Uwais's girlfriend and for trying to kill Jaa and Chen would have been enough to drive this movie as they went after Adkins and White. Either that, or this needed to be 130 minutes and done on a Fast and Furious movie scale to make it work. Just the same, for 96 minutes, if you just go fight scene to fight scene, it's not a bad deal. That early one between Chen and Uwais for example was great; and the one at the end where Jaa and Uwais go at Adkins was great too. I also liked how they used White's size to his advantage against Uwais, but I would have liked to have seen them go even further, maybe having Uwais go into an enclosed space like Jet Li did against Dolph in The Expendables and use White's size against him.

One of the things that happened while I was on hiatus, was Iko Uwais blew up, and I'm still catching up to where everyone else has been long before me. He's the youngest in the cast but more than holds his own and stands out among them as an equal, which is remarkable considering the talent involved here. After this I watched the Netflix TV show Wu Assassin, which suffered from the standard Netflix TV series issues: it was more like a 10-hour movie, meandered, and fleshed out and spent time on characters we didn't need, at the expense of more Uwais action. This was similar in the sense that we had too many characters, but as much as I wanted to see Uwais, I also wanted to see Jaa, Chen, White, Adkins, and Bisping more too, so, say, a 5 episode Netflix miniseries with this cast would have actually worked--assuming they didn't go all Netflix on it with too much plot, or course.

The thing about this cast is all of these are guys--apart from Bisping who I think needs a bit more work as a supporting character before he can carry his own lead--are the next wave of the DTV world. As the old guard are either in their late 50s, 60s, or in some cases pushing 70, someone needs to come in and carry the torch in the high octane action movies we love, and these guys are all it. In that sense, it almost is like having them all in one film is too much, because we want them all to be the leads, and the result is none of them end up being that. If you peeled off any two from this cast and put them in a buddy cop movie, 88 minutes, nice compact plot about a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, it would be a runway hit. Even something like Skin Trade that had White, Jaa, and Dolph worked really well, in that we got a good amount of all three. I think if this was supposed to be a showcase film for all six of these stars, maybe it needed less plot, and more of that showcase element, like what we got when Uwais fought Chen in the underground tournament.

This is one of five Scott Adkins that came out in 2019, the other four being the spectacular Avengement, Ip Man 4, Abduction, and Altar Rock. I joked on Twitter during Oscar night that he could have had his own category! And 2020 doesn't look like he's slowing down much, because he already has 4 in various forms of development for this year. Because he has so much out there, often my tendency is to grab something like this that has a bunch of other people in it, so I can get them all some of the spotlight on the site. It was the same mentality that caused me to focus on more of Fred Williamson's 90s and 2000s work over his great stuff from the 80s, because I was like "oh, this movie from 1996 also has Ice-T and Gary Busey in it, I've been meaning to get more of their films up too." It didn't work for Williamson, and I don't know that it works for Adkins. I'm going to stop stalling and get Avengement up next for him.

But right now we need to wrap this up. While it's on Netflix, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to check this out, but I don't know that it's a buy or even a rent, which is too bad, because with this cast you'd think it'd be an instant classic. It might be a case of less is more, and probably the better thing to do is seek out the solo works from all of these guys instead.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6643972