With Triple 9, Oz auteur John Hillcoat for better and for worse gets the closest he’s come to finding his true voice since he left the Outback for Hollywood a decade ago. His latest, a cops ’n‘ robbers thriller that’s inescapably indebted to the genre, is harsh, violent and at times repugnantly amoral. Like all of Hillcoat’s pictures from this century, Triple 9 is a gore-saturated variation on the western, but away from 19th-century Australia, Prohibition-era Virginia or post-apocalyptic America, Triple 9 feels more gruesome than Hillcoat’s other recent works partly due to the fact it’s set so close to home, in modern-day big city USA.
A particularly claustrophobic and insular Atlanta, Georgia accommodates Hillcoat’s battered lawmen and crim oddballs this time around. Innocent legs are blown apart by explosives and passers-by are shot in the street in this warzone, across which cop Chris Allen (Casey Affleck) pursues a gang of super-skilled bank robbers, unaware his new partner Marcus (Anthony Mackie) is also one of them. When the gang, fronted by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Michael Belmont, need a 999—code for “officer down,” which draws all available police to the scene—to provide a distraction from their latest heist, it falls to Marcus to do the job on Chris.
After his oddly sanitized adaptation of The Road and the intermittently punchy Lawless, Triple 9 seethes with an intense cruelty unseen in any Hillcoat movie since The Proposition. There’s a casual brutality to each character in his sweaty Atlanta, up to and including Casey Affleck’s One Good Cop, who gets the hero’s job done with swaggering, sociopathic detachment. Everyone else is plain dirty or a crook: the unfeeling bank-robbing crew of police and ex-military (Aaron Paul, Clifton Collins Jr. and Norman Reedus, joining Ejiofor and Mackie), the Russian-Israeli crime boss they’re beholden to (Kate Winslet), and Woody Harrelson’s coke-snorting detective uncle to Affleck’s Chris.
How much you can tolerate Triple 9 depends on how well you can stomach spending two hours with such unsavory characters. They’re the reason Triple 9 will prove so off-putting to some, and why the film is perhaps more uncompromising than anything else Hillcoat’s done. There’s none of the underlying humanism of The Road, nor the poetry of The Proposition, nor the ultimate moral certainty of Lawless. Triple 9 instead luxuriates in its characters’ nihilism, Hillcoat taking a nonjudgmental spectator role as bodies begin to mount and betrayals pile upon betrayals.
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