Triple Threat

One has little to look forward to anymore—the world is dying; white supremacy pervades; our society is built on the suffering of the criminally disadvantaged—except when Scott Adkins bodyslams the windshield of a speeding sedan. For, when Scott Adkins throws his impressive hulk in the way of an escaping vehicle with such ruthless grace the car seems to stop almost out of admiration, the possibilities of martial arts action cinema come into stark relief, the visceral surge of so much movie violence felt as a natural expectation to the promise of Adkins’ physical precision. Were Scott Adkins fearlessly leaping in the way of 3,000 pounds of steel barreling down a busy urban Sri Lankan street and ceasing its punishing inertia a fair assessment of the action to be found in Jesse V. Johnson’s Triple Threat, then Jesse V. Johnson’s Triple Threat would undoubtedly live up to its pedigree. It does not; Scott Adkins tumbles from the car, his risk ultimately futile.

Triple Threat refers to the combined forces of Iko Uwais, Tiger Chen and Tony Jaa, each the stars of their own revered action flicks—which counts among its directors Keanu Reeves, whose The Man of Tai Chi arguably vaunted Chen’s star persona—and today pretty much understood to be maestros of martial arts choreography. Uwais especially, who’s lately made the move into Hollywood on the backs of his ultra-bloody Indonesian actioners—last year’s The Night Comes for Us a wonderful return-to-form after the mind-numbing Marky-marked wasteland of Mile 22 —shows up in a film like this to foretell brutality, The Raid and its sequel icons of this new era of hyper-violent martial arts movies. Meanwhile, Adkins joins Michael Jai White and Michael Bisping to round out the ensemble of dependable, non-Asian direct-to-video heavies pitted against our three heroes. Let the blunt force trauma begin!

Sort of pitched between a bloodbath in which Uwais would typically be comfortable (say, Headshot) and a lean and mean White paycheck (i.e., Blood and Bone), Triple Threat never quite lives up to either, its fight scenes never as mercilessly satiating as they could get nor its plot as brisk and fatless as it should be. Instead, a muddled narrative about criss-crossing allegiances and noble billionaires and shadowy criminal enterprises pumps and farts toward the logical climax: Our two trios meet to make mincemeat of one another in an abandoned mansion, one side seeking to protect the aforementioned noble billionaire, and the other simply working off of primeval rage. Everyone you assume will die, does—which is as it should be in a pic like this.