Reseñas de la crítica

It's not difficult to see why Triple 9 was poorly received, though it's Hillcoat's most ambitious and resonant work since his 2005 breakthrough, The Proposition. This film, nihilistic to the core, has no real heroes, and its plot is stubbornly difficult to piece together, introducing expository information long after the first act has concluded. No single protagonist arises to command our attention, as Triple 9 is forever scattering out among supporting characters, played by a uniformly superb cast.

Each of these three films ["The Proposition," "The Road" and "Lawless"] sets out to break down the boundaries between the real and the mythic; or, as Virginia Eubanks writes in "The Mythography of the ‘New' Frontier," "between what is and what can be." And though Hillcoat's Triple 9 might make for a tempting fourth entry in the cycle — expanding the director's informal mythological trilogy into a tetralogy — the film struggles to find its footing without a clearly defined historical barrier.

Hillcoat's most commercial movie yet, Triple 9 features a cavalcade of stars doing their best to add luster to underwritten roles... It contains no room for lyrical asides, not even of the Edward Hopper variety. Its most evocative tableau is Ejiofor's gang getting slowly drunk on a grungy street where even the neon is burned out.

So unreconstructed that it barely registers, John Hillcoat's Triple 9 is a slickly crafted, but almost ruthlessly conventional crime thriller, winding up a handful of cops and crooks like little toys (all played to the hilt by a prestige cast) and watching them stumble into each other in a bloody climax. There's almost nothing in it that doesn't feel prescribed.

Expert craftsmanship can't rescue "Triple 9" from the constant feeling of a pulpy remix. Though Hillcoat's done wondrous things with atmosphere in "The Proposition" and "The Road," nothing in "Triple 9" sinks in. The movie borrows the cerebral, rapid-fire pacing of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" movies, which themselves owe a debt to the oeuvre of Michael Mann. "Triple 9" might be best described as "Heat" cranked up to 11, but it lacks any real investment in the stakes at hand.

With its lurid red and brooding villains, the thriller "Triple 9" comes dressed to kill. Directed by John Hillcoat, it purrs to a start with men plotting in near dark, a hook-y start that establishes the look and mood... The men's camaraderie and choreography announce their professionalism while the guns and money telegraph the stakes. And all of this is gone with the wind the moment Kate Winslet swaggers in, wearing a doo-wop bouffant and flashing a blingy Star of David as big as a bagel.

Like every film made since 1995 to feature a bank heist, John Hillcoat's Triple 9 arrives prepackaged with suggested comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat that it never earns because of its dreary literal-mindedness... Where the dialogue in Heat is abundant in deeply researched criminal argot, with direct reference circumvented through insider slang, Hillcoat's characters speak so bluntly that each man sounds like he's wearing a wire.

Like a gorgeous, aerodynamic sports car that's been saddled with a 50cc go-kart engine, John Hillcoat's Triple 9 offers – as the trade film critics like to say – a boffo tech package, but little more than flash.

Well suited to Hillcoat's gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.

Hillcoat has often excelled at rendering immersive, atmospheric environments populated by violent, morally challenged characters. In Triple 9, he presents a clammy, gaudy vision of Atlanta, peppered with grisly and eccentric visual details. The film is punctuated by some visceral action sequences, the most impressive of which isn't the big heist itself but an initially unrelated raid on a housing project that transforms the area into a war zone.