How Horny is Netflix’s ‘Triple Frontier’?

Is Triple Frontier the horniest movie Netflix has ever produced? I don’t mean in terms of depicting actual lust. (That honor falls to outrageously sex positive teen flick,The Kissing Booth.) Is Triple Frontier‘s concept intrinsically horny in a way that defies belief? Five beefcake actors — Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, and a surprisingly likable Ben Affleck — team up to pull off a dangerous heist in the South American jungle. Their target? An evil drug lord who deserves what’s coming to him.

Triple Frontier’s concept is hot. It’s sexy in a gritty, violent, and aggressive way that the slick and shiny Oceans Eleven trilogy was too mannered to reach. It features beautiful men doing bad things for what they think are good reasons. The first five minutes are almost entirely focused on the angles of Oscar Isaac’s face, and then later, the curve of his butt as he runs into a firefight. Garrett Hedlund shows off his toned abs and proceeds to casually enter an MMA fight. So there’s stuff there to make a red-blooded action fan horny. However, after these promising early scenes, Triple Frontier forgets about the handsome, tortured heartthrobs kicking ass in the jungle and cares more about tension, violence, and murky morality.

Here’s the really frustrating thing: Katheryn Bigelow was originally tapped to direct Triple Frontier, but turned producer on the project a few years ago, leaving the gig to A Most Violent Year‘s J.C. Chandor. As Decider’s Anna Menta points out, “Undoubtedly under the direction of Bigelow, the film would have taken a more nuanced, much less clichéd dive into the ultimately surface-level examination of machismo violence.” I would add that Bigelow’s version would have been way hornier.

Katheryn Bigelow is best-known for her almost noir-ish take on recent military events. Namely, the Oscar-winning films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Long before those films came out, Bigelow’s big claim to cinematic fame was another heist film that happened to be focused on the themes of brotherhood and the lengths people go to for money: Point Break. Bigelow didn’t just execute some horrifyingly beautiful tableaus of violence in that film; she also celebrated male beauty in a visceral way. Think of her introductory shot of young Keanu Reeves, smiling in the rain, or the ample scenes that linger on Patrick Swayze’s bronzed bod. Bigelow leaned hard into the horny hetero-female gaze in Point Break, and it gave the film a distinctly sensual flavor missing from a lot of other action flicks.

What Bigelow gets that a lot of other auteurs don’t is there is nothing wrong with masculine beauty. It’s not something to cover with mud, brooding, or the stereotypical trappings of toxic masculinity. Male beauty, particularly in an action film, is something that could be played up. Focusing on the terrific bone structure or perfectly chiseled abs of your actors doesn’t necessarily mean you are objectifying them. Rather, you are presenting them with the same superhuman framing that the Ancient Greeks attributed to their heroes.

Chandor seems to want to play with this motif. You see it in how he occasionally lingers a little longer than he needs to on star Oscar Isaac’s face, and includes more than one reference to how good-looking his character is. More importantly, Chandor’s pulled together a quintet of bonafide heartthrobs to star in a movie that was originally intended to feature a fifty-something Tom Hanks. (Hanks is a great romantic comedy leading man, but he’s not exactly a tumblr thirst trap.) So Chandor seems to want to play with the aesthetic of beautiful men doing dirty deeds, but his direction lacks the overt horniness that was in Bigelow’s Point Break. So it’s a job half done.

Triple Frontier had the potential to be a classic — Point Break meets Narcos! — but its lack of commitment made it a so-so version of The Punisher in the jungle.

Watch Triple Frontier on Netflix