IN Atlanta, Georgia, four hooded men rob a bank. A security device triggers, covering the money with red dye, negating its value to the annoyance, fury even, of Irina who needs the funds to buy freedom for her husband, a Russian criminal so vile and violent that even Putin’s sufficiently scared of him to bang him up without trial.

What looks like a bog-standard, cops ‘n robbers heist movie takes a different path.

For the gang of four aren’t off-the-street crims who will come to justice in the last reel through dogged police work taking advantage of their stupidity. No. After the robbery, the four change clothes and report for their day jobs as Atlanta police detectives!

Just when you thought that the movies had scraped the bottom of the barrel labelled cop-thriller plots, Matt Cook’s screenplay provides Aussie director John Hillcoat with a modicum of freshness. To deliver it, “Triple 9” has a quality cast (Chiwetel Ejiofor as the gang leader, Kate Winslet as Irina, Woody Harrelson as the detective assigned to solve the case and Casey Affleck as his nephew, also a detective). So, given those plus points, why only two stars?

As well as graphic close-ups of so many murders that they become rather old hat, a ferociously aggressive music score often drowns the dialogue and insufficient light diminishes many night and interior sequences. Flicky editing and what appears to be a hand-held camera moving nearly as much as the action combine to make reading the film difficult

In American police radio code, “999” is shorthand for “officer down”, bringing every cop vehicle in town to the scene with lights flashing and sirens blaring. And when both sides of the crime are cops, it does tend to confuse things right to the end.

At Dendy and Hoyts

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