Netflix drops so many in-house movies on such a regular basis that almost every single one of them that isn’t an effects-driven epic with a big budget and a stacked ensemble cast runs the risk of being forgotten in an instant. Ironically, Triple Frontier had all of those things, but still ranks as one of the streamer’s most inconsequential originals.
That really shouldn’t have been the case when the acclaimed filmmaker behind Margin Call and the Academy Award-nominated All Is Lost directed a screenplay originated by the Oscar-winning scribe of The Hurt Locker, with the weapons-grade cast featuring the internet’s favorite daddies Pedro Pascal and Oscar Isaac alongside Ben Affleck and Charlie Hunnam in the lead roles.
Even more bizarrely, the $115 million Triple Frontier even received a fairly enthusiastic response from critics after being deemed worthy of a 70 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, but it hardly stuck in the memory. Mark Boal was so disappointed that he ended up wanting nothing to do with the action thriller after the fact, and the film’s reputation has hardly increased over time.
The most telling thing about an already-telling Reddit thread blasting Triple Frontier for being such a colossal disappointment is a succinct comment that straightforwardly states “it wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t worthy of taking up two hours of my time.” That’s an accurately damning indictment of what read as a top-tier project on paper, but ultimately played a part in Netflix taking less and less risks when it came to spending a fortune on exclusive content that wasn’t guaranteed to perform.