Trigger Point is a difficult film to form an opinion about. Not because Trigger Point barters in any difficult or confrontational material, nor due a labyrinthine plot of twists that are difficult to navigate. Rather, within mere hours of viewing director Brad Turner’s film, crucial details of the plot and character development and action sequences already disappear from the mind—as lingering to the viewer as a gust of wind upon the skin.
There is no discernible engagement between the filmmaker and screenwriter Michael Vickerman. The latter has fashioned what is clearly meant to be thrill-a-minute action fare, in which a covert government assassin must fish out the traitor in his midst. Turner, meanwhile, has seemingly resigned himself to the utter lack of consequence or significance of this plot and drained from the proceedings any style or atmosphere that might have elevated the material. As is, the movie is slickly competent, instead of genuinely pedestrian, but that’s about as much credit as one can give something this forgettable in design, purpose and outcome.
The general idea is that a mysterious female assassin known as Fiona Snow (Laura Vandervoort, in what amounts to a cameo as thankless as it is wordless) has been killing off agents in a covert group of government-funded vigilantes whose specialty has always been eliminating the worst of the worst around the world. Nicolas Shaw (Barry Pepper, wooden as a board and just here to grimace a lot) is one of them, but before he gets wind of these killings, his boss Elias Kane (Colm Feore) has a job for him: retrieve his daughter Monica (Eve Harlow), who has been kidnapped, and some important information from a jump drive onsite.
Something else is going on here, of course, and those familiar with movies should be able to clock the twist in store for the audience pretty quickly—that someone here (or, perhaps, multiple people) is a double agent, as well as who that double agent is. Vickerman’s failing here is thinking that we might be duped by the obviously suspicious behavior of one apparent authority figure and his henchman Logan (Carlo Rota), as well as the fact that the location of one shootout is curiously bereft of anyone who could really stand a chance against Nicolas. There are a lot of other shootouts, and then the climactic foot chase.
Until that point, it’s just a matter of the movie catching up to an audience it apparently believes to be quite dim. There is nothing interesting about Nicolas—not his stoic manner, not the possibility of a cute romance with local waitress Janice (Nazneen Contractor) and certainly not his particular set of skills, which would be outshone by the likes of Jason Bourne or John Wick in a heartbeat. Trigger Point winds up just showing us how efficient Nicolas is with a silencer-clad pistol and at running. Its existence isn’t offensive. Rather, it seems to be bored with itself.
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