Director John Hillcoat’s bleak cops-and-crooks thriller, Triple 9, centers on an Atlanta-based crew of armed robbers, men united by a shared past as War on Terror mercenaries. Some of them are also currently detectives in city’s police, which provides advantages when it comes to avoiding the law. Unfortunately for this band of outlaws, they’re under the thumb of ruthless Russian Jewish mob boss Irena Vlaslov (Kate Winslet), particularly the crew’s leader Michael (Chiwetel Ejiofor), as his son is also Irena’s nephew. Adding to the robbers’ woes, the mob holds back payment from their latest job to coerce them into a seemingly impossible score, entailing penetration into a Homeland Security vault. The only way the crew will have sufficient time to complete this job is if the entire Atlanta PD is occupied elsewhere, say by a slain cop (indicated by the scanner code 999). Homicide detective Marcus (Anthony Mackie) even has a candidate in mind: his new rookie partner Chris (Casey Affleck), to whom the crooked cop has taken an instant dislike.
Hillcoat and writer Matt Cook present this sprawling saga as a labyrinth of conflicting loyalties, which tug the story’s myriad cops, thieves, and gangsters in numerous directions, not all of them expected. Wild cards enter the picture in the form of prostitutes, Mexican cartels, and the APD Major Case squad led by Chris’ uncle Jeff (Woody Harrelson). As in Hillcoat’s dusty, gristly Outback Western The Proposition, the film flits between characters on both sides of the law, never quite settling on a clear protagonist. (Although the observant, upright Chris is the only classical hero in the film’s hot, sticky mess of moral greys.) Nonetheless, whatever Triple 9 might lack in narrative focus, it makes up for in its intense, textured take on the ensemble urban crime drama form.
Triple 9 opens Friday, February 26 in wide release.
