The next Netflix movie I’m excited for is Jessica Alba’s Trigger Warning — a sprawling, spectacle-filled revenge flick which arrives on the platform next week and finds the Dark Angel and Sin City star returning to her action-oriented roots. While it’s very much not the kind of film that will win tons of awards or critical acclaim, the joy here is simply in seeing Alba (who seems to have stopped aging years ago) dispatching bad guys via everything from explosive gun battles to intimate knife fights.
In director Mouly Surya’s Trigger Warning, which hits Netflix on June 21, the Dark Angel transforms into an avenging angel. Alba plays a Special Forces commando who returns home after her father dies; there, she uncovers a conspiracy that may have had something to do with her father’s death.
I’ll admit my bias here; I have a thing for ass-kicking female protagonists. Alba plays that role perfectly here, as she looks to understand what happened to her father before she returned home from active duty. Per Netflix, her character Parker’s search for answers “quickly goes south, and she soon finds herself at odds with a violent gang running rampant in her hometown.
“Unsure of who she can truly trust, Parker draws on her commando training and proves herself a force to be reckoned with as she hunts down the truth and attempts to right what has gone wrong in Swann County, with the help of her covert ops partner and hacker Spider (Tone Bell) and connected local dealer Mike (Gabriel Basso).”
It’s worth adding, Trigger Warning is also something of a personal project for both the director and its star, each of whom lost a loved one in the recent past. Surya told Netflix she connected to this project as a result of losing her own father a few years ago. Alba, meanwhile, said her grandfather passed away while the movie was actually in development. Look closely, and you’ll actually see some of her personal family photos during scenes in the bar that Alba’s character owns.
A humble request for Netflix: More movies with Alba, please.
