A few seconds of Netflix’s Triple Frontiertrailer–where a red pickup truck with a cool roll bar gets all crashy–was enough to get me to watch the movie. That’s a decision I vaguely regretted before ultimately deciding the flick was just fine. But the cars, oh man, the cars are perfect.
(Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)
I don’t even have my own profile on my mom’s Netflix account, which is the one I log in to on my phone, computers and TV, but the application still knew I could be bullied into watching Triple Frontier by tossing up the thumbnail any time anything else, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to The Office to Grace And Frankie ended.
But just in case whatever Netflix account you use has not pitched this movie to you yet, and you couldn’t be bothered to watch the trailer, we can break it down: The motion picture feels a lot like a vehicle to celebrate the tacticool aesthetic. If you’re the type of dude who wears a keffiyeh to a paved campground and twirls a finger in a helicopter-rotor motion when you’ve finished your coffee and are ready to leave Starbucks, Triple Frontier might be your jam.
I can only talk so much shit, because I secretly think keffiyehs look pretty cool, but you all know what I’m talking about, don’t you.
In that same vein I like pew-pew-pew movies as much as the next basic bro, and this one opens pretty much perfectly. There’s adequate dramatic tension, and you only have to wait a couple minutes before you get a scene that you were hoping for: a bunch of black SUVs in a convoy followed immediately by a good old-fashioned bulletfest.
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The entertainment value sort of falls off after that, though. I won’t subject you to a comprehensive recap; my main beef is that I felt like the movie spent too much time setting up relationships between the characters, but somehow failed to make me care about them. (Our friends at The A.V. Club did a fuller review.)
Also, they go to Brazil but everybody seems to be speaking Spanish?
Anyway I wanted a movie about these five dudes standing back to back fighting their way through a bunch of different enemies, a la The Warriors. Actually based on the trailer and title “Triple Frontier” I inferred that Ben Affleck and, is that Nick from New Girl? (No.), and company would have to fight drug dealers, cops, and the military, in that order, after some kind of heist.
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But, nah, that ain’t really it. Shucks, just like when you clicked on this post to look at cars and we haven’t even talked about them yet! OK, here we go:
Early on, our heroes are rolling to the jungle in an 80-Series Land Cruiser. It’s debadged, olive green, with a big rack and lights on small but aggressive-looking tires, which is exactly what I would imagine actual professional mercenaries driving.
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The informant’s beater is just excellent. Early Civic, I think?
Even the cargo vans look a little badass with big bumpers.
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But you pretty much have to watch to the end to see the coolest vehicles. That red pickup truck I saw in the trailer turned out to be an interestingly unique 60-Series Land Cruiser pickup truck.
We also briefly get to see a Nissan hardbody, a Suzuki Samurai and another Toyota before they get blown to oblivion.
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I ended up having to watch Triple Frontier in three sittings, so maybe I would’ve enjoyed it more if I’d gotten a little more engrossed, but I think the fact that I was able to turn it off and forget about it for a day partway through gives a you clue about how riveting the movie is.
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There are some beautiful sweeping shots of jungles and mountains, though. Watching this really made me want to do another South American road trip. I mean, despite much of the film being about death and shooting, of course.
Did anybody else watch this and see any other cool vehicles I missed? or perhaps one of you with flight experience could comment on the realism of the cargo helicopter and its crash?
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