Hillcoat's approach is to craft a pulse-pounding experience that employs a mixture of conventional footage and hand-held work. There's an immediacy to the most gripping scenes.
Triple 9 is best during the first third, introducing its rogues' gallery of characters and detailing their daily grind. Unfortunately, the last third is weighed down by predictable thriller trappings.
The real screen stealer in Triple 9 is Clifton Collins Jr., as the quietly diabolical, dirty detective Rodriguez. He is a reason why this film will keep you glued to your seat.
The movie involves a pair of heists, a prisoner abroad, corrupt cops, mobsters, gangsters, and more, and the parts are considerably better than the messy, unfocused whole. But oh, the parts can be a pleasure.
As a whole, the ideas, themes, and talent the film brings together don't quite blend well enough to be satisfying in this otherwise generic crime thriller.
The problem with Triple 9 isn't that it is an uber-masculine piece of genre fiction - it is that it is a formulaic one without a distinctive personality.
The uneven thing [here] is John Hillcoat's direction: a tense, sustained journey through an apartment while lined up behind a bulletproof shield alternating with indulgent zooms and cuts depicting local color.
Hillcoat directs with a sense of immediacy and grimy realism, bringing the audience into the shootouts and bloodshed on the streets. Atlanta becomes another war zone for the men who have seen war, battling an enemy of a different race and culture.
It's the kind of crooked cop film that will likely wind up on a random list of 100 Crooked Cop Movies compiled in no ranking order... in the next few years. It's that derivative.
There's a blue-chip cast running the gamut from A (Casey Affleck) to W (Kate Winslet) and terrific action sequences in Triple 9 - but in the end, this relentlessly nihilistic crime-caper thriller adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.
