Trigger Warning

A special forces commando returns to her hometown after her father's sudden death, only to run afoul with a violent gang when she starts asking questions.

While a very successful CEO outside of Hollywood, Jessica Alba’s movie star status has diminished quiet a bit, especially in the last decade, which I suppose is why she is now returning here to her genre action roots in the movie Trigger Warning.

In Trigger Warning, Alba plays a Special Forces Commando known for solving her problems in the field with a knife, especially the one that was a gift from her father. After a ludicrously staged cold opening in some vaguely deserty place, a scene that was meant to establish Alba's bonafides as a bad-ass soldier, and also that she’s an honorable one too, but is mostly just silly, she gets a fateful phone call… her Dad has died in a mine accident.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, her dad has an old mine that he uses as a Man Cave. Get it? It's a literal cave. And he's male. There's like... a recliner in there. It's where he watches the football on a rabbit-eared TV and drinks beer. I didn't see for sure, but there's probably a poster of a lady in a bikini scotch-taped to the cave wall too.

So, Alba and her father’s knife return home, back to her dusty little no-stoplight desert small town, ready to grieve her Dad. But when she gets there, she discovers that some local assholes are responsible for her father's accident, and that it wasn't an accident at all... it was murder!

Even worse, these aren't just regular local assholes either, these are the nepo-babies of the local crimelord/Senator, a bunch of floppy-haired blonde guys and their cackling hyena goon buddies, guys who play around with rocket launchers in the back 40 like they’re shooting bottles off the fence, and then laugh and laugh... oh, how they enjoy themselves.

But bad news for the bad guys, Jessica Alba's childhood home is tomboy heaven. It's the kind of rough and tumble place that will have the odd M-67 fragmentation grenade rolling around in the kitchen junk drawer, alongside some loose batteries, the scotch tape (for posters), a few random mystery keys, an old remote control that may have belonged to a CD player that was thrown away years ago, a weird-shaped hot pink paper clip, way too many pens with no ink, some unidentified piece of electronics that looks like it's supposed to plug into a car's cigarette lighter, and a good dozen mismatched Allen Wrenches.

So, she's basically ready for anything...

After that? Well, that's all Jessica Alba can stand, and she can't stand no more! This means that Jessica Alba then goes around town, trying her best to convince us all that she is more than capable of legitimately kicking a ton of redneck ass.

She really does her best, you guys.

She really does.

Good job, Jessica! So convincing. Bless your little heart.

This is a film set in “real“ America, a place that loooooves to thank soldiers for their service, but hates those low down dirty varmint elitist corporate fat cats, and despite the fact that Alba calls an M4 a “machine gun” she’s totally believable as a special ops soldier, especially when she's fighting a chainsaw-wielding bad guy that she happened to catch trying to stick-up the local grocery store with his buddies.

Despite all the... basically everything that this film does... I really did appreciate how the film portrayed the bad guys realistically, as they’re all White, Christian, and Conservative, and as a result, considered to be "good people" by the rest of the white community.

I always appreciate a little bit of realism in my action movies.

Trigger Warning is a film that really truly thinks it’s totally awesome and hard core, and all the while, it clearly has no idea how dumb it is, or how much it feels like a soap opera-quality production of military fanfic that was written by guys who may love the fuck out of the military, but really only in the way that they really love playing Call of Duty and also watching shitty action movies just like this one.

I almost feel bad for poor Jess, because... wow.

This is an inept film.