“You’ve been shot five times for your country and you can’t even afford to send your kids to college.”

***

A stellar cast though there may be here, even the likes of Affleck, Pascal and Isaac can’t distract from Triple Frontier’s stubborn pacing issues and questionable character decisions. Opening at a slow burn speed that takes a solid chunk of the film to recover from, it does eventually manage to rustle up a half-decent quandary for the characters to contend with. If only their choices in dealing with their predicament weren’t so muddled, then the later plot twists might just have had a greater impact.

Watching the rag-tag group of military men unravel as their robbery of a cartel devolves into a series of screw-ups is effectively exasperating though. The more they mess up, the higher the consequences, ratcheting up the tension to at least an engaging level. But by that point, honestly, I just wasn’t that fussed either way if the characters made it out alive; you reap what you sow, and these dum-dums brought all their impending pain upon themselves.

Rating (out of 5):