Jessica Alba back in action mode

Along with sexy, sweaty Regency-era romance series and mediocre sci-fi, one of Netflix’s main exports is military and military-themed action movies. It’s an easy sell: There will always be a market for stories about righteous soldiers using their tactical training and tough martial arts skills to save their country, or their family, or their comrades, or some combination of all three. Trigger warningNetflix’s latest thriller starring Jessica Alba isn’t mind-blowing, but it’s one of the streaming service’s better offerings.

The film begins with Parker (Alba), a veteran special forces operative, escaping a group of terrorists in the middle of the Syrian desert. When her team comes to rescue her, she stops one of them from executing their prisoners in anger – she’s a fighter, but not a bloodthirsty one. Soon after, a former flame calls to tell her that her father died in a collapse of the mine he dug on her land in New Mexico. So she heads home, moving into 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 when a gang of black market arms dealers start wreaking havoc in the city, she soon realizes there’s more to it than meets the eye – and that her father’s death may not have been an accident after all. Luckily for her, this kind of detective work puts her most important skill to good use: finding creative ways to beat up bad guys.

Trigger warning is the English-language debut of acclaimed Indonesian director Mouly Surya, best known for thrillers such as her 2008 debut Fiksi and 2017 Marlina, the murderess in four actsThe latter was the inspiration for the term “Satay Western” due to its Western-inspired narrative and rural setting. Trigger warning is something of a modern American Western: a soldier returns from war to find her community in worse shape than when she left it, determined to avenge the suspicious death of a family member. In this version, Alba wields her fists instead of guns, preferring to fight with her hands and knives and, in one particularly creative scene, with various construction tools she finds in a hardware store.

The screenplay was partly written by writer Halley Gross, who won several awards for her work on the survival adventure video game. The Last of Us Part IIAnd Trigger warning is very video game-like indeed. The fight scenes are separated by conversations that sound like game characters meandering through dialogue trees, with each conversation containing one or two pieces of information that Parker uses to build up a picture of what is really going on. The fight scenes – essentially any scene without dialogue – are great and numerous, with Surya and her crew taking their cues from the John Wick-ification trends that currently dominate the action genre. You might think it would get old, but fights that “feel like John Wick“ are generally good, so I can’t really complain.

Aside from Alba’s Parker, the rest of the film is populated by the obligatory gun-toting gangsters, three to five interchangeable guys with brownish-blonde hair and beards who are either allies or adversaries, a guy with a secret cannabis farm and a pet iguana, and a talkative hacker named, of course, Spider. Anthony Michael Hall appears in a few scenes as a slightly villainous shadowy figure, a senator running for re-election who vows to fight for the “liberty, family and faith” of his constituents, whose political leanings are probably obvious.

The film stays self-consciously current with a few references to “Karens” and a bit about the term “Latinx,” though with a title like “Trigger Warning,” you’d expect the characters to trade more barbs about soy-faced liberals and alt-right fascists. There are a few nods to Parker’s—and by extension, Alba’s—Mexican heritage: Her flashbacks to her father and herself as a young girl are entirely in Spanish, and a brief scene depicting her father’s funeral is shot like something out of a telenovela, with Alba crying beautifully over strains of Ángela Aguilar’s lament “La llorona.”

If any, Trigger warning is a film for those of us who have missed Alba in action star mode – in recent years, she seems to have focused on roles where her characters punch first and ask questions later. Considering how terrible other Netflix action movies featuring A-list actresses have been recently (I’m looking at you, AtlasAnd you, heart of stoneAnd you, maid), it’s almost revolutionary to see a film that really grips you. Plus, there’s an iguana in this film.