Triple Threat Movie Review

Three top action actors in a series of simple fight scene

This year, an Indonesian production house released an international action movie which is presented in English even though the story is located in Indonesia and all of the main casts are Indonesian. A month later, an Asian action movie is released. The movie starred three actors from Thailand, China, and Indonesia respectively and each of them had opportunity to dialogue with each native language. So in this movie we would find some dialogs are said in Thai, Mandarin, and Indonesian. Thus, this movie seemed to explain that an international movie doesn’t have to presented in all-English language.

This 96 minutes movie is basically a simple action movie. What makes it interesting is the appearance of the main actors which come from different countries. The plot itself is kinda straightforward when the movie initially showed Xiao Xian who is very rich and intended to take down a big crime syndicate with her father’s legacy. Next, our trio are introduced at a raid in Thailand where Payu (Tony Jaa) and Long Fei (Tiger Chen) were in a side where they believed are in a humanity mission. However, they were double-crossed and almost killed while the “humanity mission” was actually a mission to free a terrorists’ leader. At the mission, Jaka (Iko Uwais) fainted while his wife was dead as well as the other villagers. Then the movie set their first show-off scenes in an illegal boxing arena before elaborating each of their background and set their mutual mission, to take down the terrorist group. Entering the second part of the story, the movie turned to be a sequence of simple showdown and runaway scenes with the addition of a plot twist. It’s where Jaka seemed setup the showdown scenario for the trio at the time the same terrorist group was given a mission to kill Xiao Xian. Hence, it became their addition task to keep Xiao Xian save. Until the end of the story, this movie is filled with action scenes which are quite simple and not impressive enough.

For the story itself, this movie has just enough character development inferred by their motivation to work together and their background. Each of the hero sometimes spoke on their native language to show their own background and let the story flow naturally. Despite having a plot twist, the story plot is straightforward and focus on the main purpose of the trio, to take down the terrorists. When the terrorists were all killed and the mastermind of the terror were found, the movie ended smoothly. What kinda surprising is, in this movie, Iko is given a more tactical role which let the other two to encounter the terrorist group. Then his character (Jaka) will be the least deadly. Hence more thrilling action portion were given to the other two, especially at the final battle scene.

In short, this is a simple and straightforward action movie. However, I still rated this movie 5 of 10 for its natural story flow.