How do you make a film if it has, in fact, already been made? This, I think, it the main difficulty which Triple 9 runs into. It’s good, it’s very good. And, everywhere, it’s haunted by Heat.
Michael Mann’s movie is seminal: a fin-de-millennium classic which summed up everything that blockbuster Hollywood could offer a constellatory twin legacy of Italian American acting, whose stars had been ascending in parallel since they broke onto the scene together in the late 1960s. Everyone’s still talking about that mythological restaurant scene between De Niro and Pacino (just see Tom Hiddleston gushing out his duologue imitation on The Graham Norton Show). The riff-y, partially ad-libbed sequence which united two titans on screen together for the first time is now a bona fide piece of cinema history. It wouldn’t be nearly so iconic if it wasn’t for its place within the larger framework of a finely-tuned heist thriller, where Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight and a pre-teenage Natalie Portman supply ample heavyweight acting chops in support of the two stars; and the third protagonist of the movie is L.A. herself, transformed into an impressionistic metropolis, which is by turns a seedy vortex of crime or a beautiful canvas of hazy West Coast romanticism. The polarity of the two — the pragmatic cop’s end-of-the-century pit of decadence versus the aspirational thief’s glitteringly optimistic horizons — is what creates such a compellingly balanced cinematic playground for Mann to weave his magic within. Dissolving the divide between what constitutes bad and good guy, Heat gives its audience two champs to root for. De Niro’s Neil McCauley is a loyal disciplinarian, who might have been primus inter pares in any profession except he chose crookery; Pacino’s Detective Hanna is the last of a rare and raw breed of maverick, ideologically bruised but still (for reasons only known to his own traumatised psyche) scrambling to save his city from vice and violence.
I say all this only to point out the monumental task which Triple 9 undertakes, angling to be considered a work with gravitas in a genre where nearly all attempts since 1995 have been duds. There was, admittedly, another strong a strong play for icon status in 2006, when Spike Lee (otherwise of a slightly more avant-garde inclination) gave blockbuster a go, and released Inside Man, which pitted a top-game Denzel Washington against a criminally underrated Clive Owen. Inside Man takes the futurist glamour of Heat and sends it inwards while revving it up — the film, instead of ruminating around the vistas of the City of Lights in wide aspect, gets caught in the claustrophobia of New York’s vertical lines. It precisely choreographs its action to the relentlessness of post-millennial Wall Street fervour. Still glitz, still glam, but a with a whole new kind of spatiality and tension. And yet, strong contender though it is, Inside Man just fails to match Heat‘s brand of cool. Once established, it seems the president of any genre is very hard to topple.
Different times, different philosophies. That’s what Triple 9‘s director Jonathan Hillcoat gets so, so right, and what helps propel 2016’s offering to the genre out from the dirge of banality that has been clasped around the genre since the early noughties. Back then, pre-2008, the boom spirit in Hollywood was hegemonic, and the greats could afford to be cinematographically slick. Even the bleaker downtown scenes of Heat are warped by vaguely hyperreal strobe illuminations, casting everything in the comforting, fictionalising cushion of backlit, soft-core neo-noir.
Nowadays, the context’s different. The conditions of production are guided by a world which seems less satisfied with glamour than it did before, a world which keeps pressuring filmmakers to ask different, more invasive, more nuanced questions; a world which insists Hollywood should look at what’s ugly and messy and catastrophic with unfiltered vision.
Bearing that in mind, Hillcoat takes what he does best — violence (see Lawless) — and he shoves it into a genre which bears out an aesthetics of scum surprisingly well. There’s heaps of action (some of the journalists sitting beside me in the preview said, too much action), fine-tuned to a ballet of gunfire and bloodshed; the mess never lets up. Everything propels towards chaos, towards death. What’s more, there’s no blurring the boundary between good and bad. The boundary’s more or less shoved to the side, in a story where everybody appears to be pretty damn awful. This is a tale where the cops aren’t just dirty; the bureaucracy itself is a cesspit, its infrastructure riddled with rats, moles, and guys who’re taking in just enough illegitimate cash to turn a blind eye.
Against this backdrop, Michael (Chitewel Ejiofor) just can’t disentangle his crew of thieves from the whims of an Israeli-Jewish mafia queen, who’s played with career-defying chutzpah by a ruthlessly amoral Kate Winslet. Winslet, an excellent actress who is rarely asked to step outside of her cerebral-cookie comfort zone, has fun with this. She frosts her performance with a squeeze of icy glamour and plays things up with a flicker of theatrical eccentricity; the kind which only actors who specialise in understated nuance can pull off well. Winslet’s Irina has a complicated hold over Michael: her sister’s son is Michael’s child. It’s leverage she uses to her advantage, but she’s also unafraid to twist the fear of God into his crew with the occasional fatal warning. That crew, incidentally, comprises two active members of the police force (Marcus played by Anthony Mackie, and Rodriguez, played by Clifton Collins Jnr) and one ex-cop (Gabe, played by Aaron Paul). These are the same crooks who hold up banks only to visit them as a crime scene, flashing their badges, less than half an hour later. At stake aren’t souls and integrity, but things which must be held accountable to a much swifter and less forgiving pace: the objectives here are money and survival. As Woody Harrelson’s alcoholic police captain Jeffrey Allen advocates in a slurred, bleak apothegm to his nephew, played by Casey Affleck (Chris, the only character who seems resistant to the avalanche of corruption going on in this part of town): “out-monster the monster and get home by the end of the night.”
Harrelson, as the depressive copper, loyal to his family and, vaguely, to the idea of law enforcement as a social necessity, but otherwise spiralling into the depths of his own substance abuse, gives a great turn in this movie. He’s been having quite the couple of years, and it’s nice to see an actor come into his own so excellently via middle age. Jeffrey Allen, it appears, is the comic book sketch of the American WASP’s reality: not so much the fantastic urban bachelor as a crumbling man on the ledge of his own sanity. Affleck is always underrated — in Hollywood terms, he and his big brother (Ben) chart the same dynamic as taciturn poet versus high school football captain — but he has a low-key talent which injects most parts he plays with an appealing level of cool. Here, he makes his own of a role that was originally intended for Shia Lebouf (the star of Hillcoat’s Lawless); one can imagine the tone of the whole film being strikingly different if that first casting had occurred, but personally I see Affleck’s addition to the cast as a welcome one. He manages to play the character as someone who genuinely wants to do good without being anything so icky and useless as a “do-gooder”, and it’s not too difficult to envisage that this part in the wrong hands would have turned it into some kind of Zodiac-era Jake Gyllenhaal, boy-scout-lost-in-the-woods type of thing. Great for that film; terrible (probably) for this. Affleck, with his laconically endearing looks and the permanent ghost of trouble behind his eyes, puts his “the cool brother” status to full use. Besides, he may be the good guy of this movie, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find him turning an almost-blind eye to a smattering of cop brutality in the dirtiest dive bar in town.
Amoral, backstreet Atlanta — that’s the setting for this film. Roadsides roll out and they look like they got trapped in a Depression-era dustbowl. A tawny heat, captured by simmering cinematography, steams up the squalor of abandoned junkie houses; this is a toxic suburbia overrun with bitterness, distrust, inter-tribal tension, and guns. Unspoken laws rule, with transgressions punishable by death. Hillcoat takes no prisoners when it comes to smearing the film in flourishes of casual gore — a row of severed heads decorating a car windscreen, anyone? — or suggesting imminent atrocity is everyday — like a baby lying between a target and twenty pointed rifles; but you get the feeling that the movie, though steeped in reeling chaos, has a noble quest at its core. It’s searching for something that can account for the diasporic intersection of various American identities; for a vision of, if not an answer to, generationally-cumulated poverty and the complex sociopolitical issues which pulse away beneath the stats for every gun death or minority put in jail. Does it find what it’s looking for? Well, no, not exactly, but I don’t think it’s the answer that’s the main thing at stake so much as the process. This is an action film without a heart, but with what springs up in place of a heart: an angry, blistering energy, hurtling constantly towards zero.
The shape of Triple 9 is ontologically tangly, zoning in on the messy matrixes of power which erupt in urban centres, and struggling against time to show how alliances must shift and bend to suit minute-by-minute street-side situations. It doesn’t get the benefit of a 2+ hour run, given that post-millennial filmmaking has typically been hostile to a languid structure; pity, because the complexity of plot here means we lose the chance to flesh some characters out in backstory, reverting to a shorthand of having them summed up in a fleeting snippet of behaviour or a few brief lines. Still, the performers, who are all strong — who are all committed to being “actors’ actors”, so to speak — bring their A-game, colouring what shortage of material they have with as much as they’ve got. Two heist sequences bookend the film, bracketing it structurally within a masquerade of order to contain the chaos between. That, too, is the obsession of the lens: tiny details. Architecture and bank vaults, tower blocks and safety deposit boxes — the occasional flash of regimented order, of rectangles and lines, provides the odd suggestion for film aestheticians to salivate over, as the Atlantan metropolis futilely attempts to pull the insanity of blood and consequence back from the brink. It’s a kind of deception, and it puts a half-glossy veneer over these depths of hell. Atlanta, land of cops and crooks? Enter at risk. Here be monsters.
