“TRIGGER WARNING” (2024) | Film Review

Reference to Jackie Chan: none available

Trigger warning: Contains an opinion.

If you order Rambo, John Wick and Road House from Temu, you’ll get “TRIGGER WARNING” (2024) with Jessica Alba delivered to your doorstep free of charge in Netflix’s latest direct-to-streaming flop.

“TRIGGER WARNING” (2024) is another film that wants to run under the “strong female lead” category. The diverse actress Jessica Alba was cast for this film, and she is also producing it. More on this later.

Netflix is once again capitalising on the hypocritical zeitgeist of ultra-liberal equality advocates who only have one enemy: toxic masculinity. If you don’t have any other problems in life, people with weak characters have to create their own problems in order to fight them and then celebrate themselves as heroes and underdogs. Absolute hypocrisy.

And that’s exactly what you’re confronted with in the first few minutes of watching “TRIGGER WARNING”. In fact, the screenplay was written back in 2016 by two men who were already involved in real hits with female heroes in the 80s and 90s, such as “THE NET” (1995) with Sandra Bullock; an absolutely entertaining tech thriller that has aged well, just like the popular German-American Sandy Bullock.

At the time, they wanted a film that was a mixture of Rambo and John Wick. Years later, the young author Halley Wegryn Gross was brought in for re-writes before Netflix picked up the project with Alba. You can guess which elements were written “extremely unpleasantly” by Ms Gross; her surname says it all. It’s kind of cute how industry people want to fight their enemy of so-called toxic masculinity with exactly the same elements, only now the “strong female lead” is supposed to take over.

“Women can do everything men can do and even better.” Yeah, no, they can’t. Nor does the reverse apply, just for the sake of equal completeness. In the film, Alba plays some kind of female soldier whose father was killed in a mine accident. Now she emotionlessly returns home to continue running a bar. She is portrayed as very tough: emotionally cold, smoking, drinking, swearing, and then she bangs her old village flame and marches thoughtfully off on a mission at night. Wow, how emancipated and courageous of this woman.

You should never ask questions about logic and motives in Netflix’s direct-to-stream productions. Where in the 80s direct-to-video stars actually enjoyed a B and C-movie fanbase, the multi-million dollar direct-to-streaming attempts with ex-stars appeal to no one. The scenes are once again too dark, the slasher sound effects absolutely over the top and nobody, really nobody buys that the 60kg Alba can defeat a 90kg army soldier.

And then colour comes into play. When Jessica Alba received confirmation from Mario Lopez in 2010 that she was 87% European and therefore “whiter than Larry David”, her disappointment was clear to see. Where Ariana Grande and Mindy Kaling apparently wanted to appear whiter in the course of their careers, i.e. actually visually, Alba so desperately wants to be counted among the POC. Hollywood is fake and hypocritical and denies the true POC performers their being, their heritage, their talents. Produce a film like this with a still-no-name and no agenda and see what positive things can happen.

You can either skip the film or ignore it altogether. Nobody is missing out. An absolute low point in a time of creative depression triggered by ultra-progressive obsessive thinking. But I already know that my opinion doesn’t count with people like that because I’m white. Hypocrites.

Warning 0 out of 10 stars

Original trailer | “TRIGGER WARNING” (2024)

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