I just watched Triple Frontier and I have a LOT of questions

Photo Credit: Netflix

WARNING. This post is chock full of spoilers. If you haven’t seen Triple Frontier and you want to be surprised by all its plot holes, stop reading now. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt my feelings.

Now then... I watched Triple Frontier last night on Netflix and I have lots of questions. I like a good action movie and I love a good heist film, but man! Don’t get me wrong, plenty of movies leave me wondering about some of the decisions the screenwriter and/or filmmaker made, but this one... This project was once associated with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. Both bailed before it finally got made and after watching it, I can see why. The movie starts out promising. I enjoyed the set-up and character introductions, but by the time their South American caper gets going, the wheels start coming off big time. For instance:

Why make a show of Pope’s (Oscar Isaac) knee problems being so bad? Yovanna (Adria Arjona), a character that doesn’t appear to be particularly athletic, outruns him after the drug bust then he talks about his knees and neck surgery being the reasons he’ll need to retire from his mercenary job, yet these ailments don’t impair his hike over the Andes Mountains in the slightest.

Why did Redfly (Ben Affleck) get greedy during the heist and blow their deadline to leave before the drug lord’s scheduled reinforcements showed up? He’s the planner. He knew the importance of timing and when the new guards would arrive. If anything, shouldn’t Pope have been the one to get greedy? After all, Pope’s the one who lied to the team to convince them to conduct the raid in the first place.

Why did this team of trained soldiers not properly sweep the house before beginning to tear down the walls and bag up the loot? How could they not have found the safe room the bad guy was holed up in?

Why in the world did all five of these guys go nuts when they found the money in the walls? They busted those walls and bagged up the money without even a glance to make sure no more bad guys showed up to shoot them in the back during the robbery. Isn’t a look-out kind of a common thing to have during a covert mission?

Why have Ironhead (Charlie Hunnam) get wounded during the heist if the wound never plays into their trek over the mountains? It didn’t seem to slow him down at all.

Why did no one stop to consider the extra money they gathered would be too heavy to transport by air while they were bagging it up? Again, Redfly is supposed to be this badass commander and planner. How could he not realize there would be no way to get the extra hundreds of pounds of cash over the mountains?

Why would these trained soldiers and newly minted murderers not hide their faces when driving by the family of the man they’d just killed as they cruise right by them in the very driveway of the scene of the crime?

Once they realize the helicopter is going to be overweight at the airfield, why didn’t the team just give more of the money to Yovanna or the pilot who delivered the copter? Both could have carried more than they received.

When the helicopter is approaching the cliff and Catfish (Pedro Pascal) realizes they won’t make it due to being overburdened, why didn’t they turn around and find a place to bury the excess money instead of dumping it into the jungle?

After they crash and end up being forced to kill the villagers to protect their loot, how could five mules possibly carry a large helicopter-sized load of money bags? The amount of bags was obviously much smaller than what they’d originally loaded into the copter. Shouldn’t the filmmaker just have shown the team giving what they couldn’t carry to the village elder as payment for their dead instead of the piddly $2M Pope negotiated?

Why have Ben (Garrett Hedlund) light a fire on the mountaintop, giving away their position, when the team had just talked about the danger of this idea the night before? Are we to believe they’re all so frazzled that the danger just wasn’t important to them as they were fleeing for their lives and laden with millions of dollars of stolen cash?

Why ask the boatman to meet them outside a town when they have hundreds of miles of empty coastland to do it without the drug lord’s henchman swarming down on them?

And finally why didn’t Pope, the guy who came up with the plan and was most interested in getting the money home, not think to record the coordinates of where they buried it in the mountains? Was he really just going to consider it sunk forever? Only Ironhead was level-headed enough to think of this contingency?

I could probably list even more questions, but you get the gist. Why did Netflix spend a big budget and quality cast on a film with so many fixable problems?