Along with sexy, sweaty Regency-era romance shows and middling science-fiction movies, military and military-adjacent action movies are one of Netflix’s main exports. It’s an easy sell: There will always be a market for stories of righteous soldiers using their tactical training and badass fighting skills to save their country, or save their family, or save their fellow soldiers, or some combination of the three. Trigger Warning, Netflix’s newest thriller starring Jessica Alba, isn’t amazing, but it’s one of the streaming service’s better offerings.
The film opens with Parker (Alba), a skilled Special Forces operative, evading a bunch of terrorists in the middle of the Syrian desert. When her team comes to extract her, she stops one of them from executing their captives in anger—she’s a fighter, but she’s not bloodthirsty. Shortly afterward, a former flame calls to inform her that her father has died due to a cave-in in the mine he was digging on their New Mexico land, so she heads home, taking up residence in her father’s house and working at the local bar he used to own.
But something about her father’s death doesn’t sit right with Parker, and with a gang of black-market arms dealers prowling around the town she soon comes to realize that there’s more to all of this than meets the eye—and her father’s death may not have been an accident after all. Luckily for her, this sort of detective work involves her main skill set: finding creative ways to beat up bad guys.
