21 | June | 2024 | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new Netflix movie “Trigger Warning” stars Jessica Alba, who recently announced that she is stepping away from the business she founded “The Honest Company”, which has given her a net worth of about 340 million dollars.

Alba’s first return as a movie actress since stepping down is unfortunately a bad Netflix movie “Trigger Warning” about a highly skilled Special Forces commando, played by Alba. Alba’s character Parker returns to her hometown to investigate her father’s sudden death, due to an accident in a cave. The entire story from the beginning to the end, is all about finding new excuses for Alba to show off her violent hand-to-hand combat skills, which far too often result in her killing all comers with a large knife, or breaking their neck, or more rarely – just shooting them to death.

One sign of a very bad script is that the entire reason for driving the story forward is creating another excuse for a violent fight where several people die. Its hard to identify any real consistent or coherent story here, with yet another great example of why anyone with so much fame and wealth would read a script this bad, on a return to acting, and still decide to take this role. This movie represents a very bad decision for someone who is trying to return to making movies.

The critics across this board ranked this film one of the worst of the year with an average rating of only 15%. I agree with this low rating, considering the only thing worth seeing in the entire 2 hours are some of the fight scenes with no real story.

The problem is always the same. Great scripts are hard to find and even harder for anyone to write. The solution is the same as the decision of Jennifer Lopez who recently made the recent bad “Atlas”. When you have so much money, and you want quality over quantity, hire the best screenwriter who has the best idea and then make a good or great movie. Never settle for something easy or expedient. It is always better to wait for quality and never settle for bad or mediocre just to stay relevant.

This movie is too bad to recommend, and I rate it a “fast forward to the action scenes and miss the rest mess.”

The new movie “The Bikeriders” will surprise many fans who will expect a standard movie drama about men in the late 1960’s and 70s who chose a life of crime, riding bikes, drinking, and drugs, during the era of the Vietnam War. Instead, this movie tries to tell the story like it’s an interview/documentary with the main interviewee, Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, talking to a reporter about her life as the wife of a motorcycle gang member, Benny, played by Austin Butler. This entire story is told from Benny’s perspective and his life of meeting and then marrying his wife.

The problem with this unusual method of screenwriting telling is that the story becomes less chronological and more a series of vignettes, that can get old rather quickly. The idea of this kind of life is always the same, “when you live a life of violence, your time is always coming”. What goes around comes around with people like this, who spend their entire lives looking over their shoulder, or getting arrested by the police.

This movie stars a number of well-known famous actors, including Norman Reedus, Michael Shannon,
Tom Hardy and Damon Herriman. The acting is overall very good, with a story that meanders to different times with some flashbacks and at times moves too slowly. Unfortunately, other than telling the story like an interview/documentary there is nothing new here, nothing that all moviegoers have seen before.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are an average 82% with my rating 70% and a very marginal recommendation, only for some of the acting.