Triple 9

Seemingly perfect, because at first glance everything looks as it should to be a proper crime drama. It has nice covers, a stellar cast in atypical roles (Chiwetel Ejiofo, Kate Winslet), and a well-known director of cruelty behind the camera. But in the end, it only looks like that, because this heist story like The Town is just a conundrum of who survives the longest. There’s no tangible plot, and the little there is punishingly quickly wrapped up. Watching 115 minutes of mobsters, junkies, Nazis, tattooed Mexicans, etc. who's going to hit who first, a raw probe into the criminal rabble of a big American city population, it’s not bad, especially when the demon Atticus Ross plays along and that out-of-focus, volatile camera makes you feel like Ayer assisted. But script-wise, it's a complete piece of shit. (04/06/2016)

A large number of great or at least very good actors, violence and action, and a story about how everyone is an idiot and a pig. Almost everyone. Or is it everyone completely? And in addition, there is the amazing Kate Winslet, who is a bitch, but so beautiful that you can't take your eyes off her. However, a failed film that fortunately quickly leaves my mind. (22/07/2016)

If I leave aside the fact that this film offers rather solid action scenes, I wouldn’t know what else I should talk about in this case. Triple 9 had a great cast of actors and it didn’t manage to work with them well enough for me to get used to any single one of them at least for a while. Instead, the movie focuses on a band of nasty Hispanic guys who make life miserable both for the group of familiar actors and for ourselves. And that’s a world I don’t need to see. (18/03/2017)

Olivier Marchal, David Ayer, Shawn Ryan, James Ellroy and, last but not least, Don Winslow are the big names of dirty harsh criminal movies about corrupt police officers in the movies/series/literature. And with this feature-length debut, Matt Cook enters the same room with them. He lags behind but only a little bit. Yes, it has such potential. It's a pity that it´s conflicting with Hillcoat's concept, because chose the wrong pace of narration. Considering how much is happening and on how many levels, it gives you feeling that it´s way too lengthy. I´m not saying boring, not at all. But this movie was supposed to be an adrenaline-fueled ride driven by inner tension and not a slow-paced something that looks like nothing is really going on. But even that being said, it´s exceptional in terms of genre. And even more considering that similar movies were almost exclusively made as series. (31/05/2016)

It's strange to say the least that despite a first class cast, Hillcoat has failed to create anything more than a slightly above average genre spectacle. In truth, Triple 9 suffers from a kind of "overcasting" where the individual stars of the cast act more like staffage without adequate impact on the plot itself. It's as if John Hillcoat, after the successful Lawless, thought he'd now do a police heist with star actors for a change, except that John Hillcoat simply isn't Michael Mann, David Ayer, or Ben Affleck. The result is a kind of weird mishmash of police drama, gangster movie, and heist film that has its moments, but these are truly scarce. It's an example of wasted potential with an extremely poor Kate Winslet who has nothing to play and the scenes with her really hurt. [60%] (23/11/2020)