I’m a believer in the idea that certain things can move the needle in a positive or negative direction. yes, there’s a core movie, but sometimes something stands out that is better or worse than the rest, and it is possible to move your feelings about that film just a little bit. For example, sitting through a movie you don’t really care for, only to find out that it secretly was headed to a mindfuck of an ending. That ending alone could sway you. Sometimes, because Netflix’s mold relies on one or two stars anchoring a project, the charisma of the stars can help a movie. Certainly Jennifer Lopez could be attributed to Atlas getting a slightly higher mark for the mediocre Atlas, as Adam Sandler and Paul Dano also helped Spaceman. But, sometimes even a star I like is given nothing to work with, and they get buried in an awful film, like Damon Wayans Jr, Tom Ellis, and Gina Rodriguez in Players or Dan Levy’s Good Grief.

Then, you just have a movie like Trigger Warning, a giant nothing burger of a film that has been gestating for eight years before Netflix decided to throw the script at Jessica Alba. I don’t want fans of Alba Botanicals to riot, but Jessica Alba just isn’t a strong actress. I’m not saying there aren’t projects where she’s been fine, but it is a lot harder to match her to a project. she can’t just be given any film, because her charisma goes nowhere.

Honestly, I was more excited to see Mark Webber, who is a criminally underrated actor, and then I saw what the film did to him, and I wish he was in something else. Even Anthony Michael Hall is bad in this. this just never works.

The movie follows a trained soldier (Alba), who after thwarting some terrorists, gets a phone call from her ex letting her know her dad died in a mining accident. So, she heads out to the middle of nowhere in New Mexico to claim her dad’s property, and check out the scene. Soon, she figures out that weapons are being moved, and there’s some plot development between her ex and the rest of his family that is running guns. can she even trust the one person she thinks she can trust?

Anthony Michael Hall steps in with some weird monologue abut race, and how his character isn’t racist, and it just adds to all the oddities in the film. Like, who is going to her dad’s bar in the middle of nowhere? Why is there a boy feeding this iguana in the middle of a rainstorm… in New Mexico? Who decided Jessica Biel was an action star?

The script never makes sense, and the only way to make this film entertaining is to straight up give this to an action oriented actress. It has to be someone who is totally comfortable doing their own stunts, so the movie seems to have some kind of purpose, instead of pulling its punches so Alba can look good doing simple moves. Honestly, Gina Carano would have been a better choice. I know there are other action stars, I just need you to know that this action film has no action, and its weak script could have literally only been made better by someone who actually ca fight. It’s like how we used to put Jet li into shitty movies like Cradle 2 The Grave, and somehow the movie was watchable. It had nothing to do with the script, but Jet Li made it watchable. Alba couldn’t save this film. she should be doing romantic comedies.

The audio description, which is International Digital center, written by Liz Gutman, and narrated by Jason Udoff, is fine. sadly, if I had gotten my hands on the movie, and fleshed out the action scenes with someone who could do them, Dakota would have had more to describe. instead, she wrote a perfectly fine script for a dull misfire. Accessibility should be everywhere, because art is subjective, but seeing others react to this, I think IDC, and their talents work is going to go largely under appreciated.

Dakota Green has a wealth of excellent scripts underneath her, but this was the first time I think I had heard Jason udoff before, and I hope he is able to use this to parlay into better films. IDC works a lot for Netflix, and the work pays the bills, but a lot of their talent gets assigned to these movies of the week that no one talks about a month later, and people can’t even remember watching a year or two later, let alone anything about the audio description. Trigger Warning might have thought it was designed to explode, but it’s just a dud.

Final Grade: D+