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TRIGGER POINT: 2 STARS. “looks good when the bullets are flying.”

“Trigger Point,” a new action movie starring Barry Pepper and now on VOD, is stylish looking and features good actors but suffers from a bad case of been there, done that.

Pepper is Lewis, a retiree leading a quiet life in a quiet upstate New York town. His days are spent at the local diner, flirting with waitress Janice (Nazneen Contractor) and sipping tea at the quaint local book store.

His home life, however, isn’t so quaint. His cabin-in-the-woods is a veritable fortress, complete with high tech surveillance gear and drone security.

Turns out Lewis is actually Nicolas Shaw, a former superspy for a shady operation called The Agency. In hiding after his actions resulted in the assassinations of his entire team, he’s brought back into the dangerous world of international intrigue by his former handler Elias Kane (Colm Feore).

Kane’s daughter Monica (Eve Harlow) has been kidnapped by the shadowy figure who may have been responsible for the methodical murder of Shaw’s team.

So, just when he thought he was out, Shaw is dragged back to the underworld to rescue Monica and search down the man responsible for his professional and personal undoing.

“Trigger Point” director Brad Turner has a long and varied list of television credits, including episodes of “MacGyver,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Hawaii Five-O.” He knows how to shoot action and where to put the camera so the movie looks good when the bullets are flying.

He’s also good at casting interesting looking, solemn-faced actors like Pepper, Feore and Carlo Rota, all of whom have tread this territory before.

It’s in the storytelling that things go south. Weighed down by tough guy banalities, there is very little in “Trigger Point” that we haven’t seen before and done better. The actors breathe whatever life they can into this collection of clichés but no amount of grim determination can elevate this above the level of a forgettable direct to video time waster.


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