Jessica Alba’s new starring car boasts loads of motion film credentials. The star, making her first function movie look in 5 years after guiding her enterprise enterprise The Trustworthy Firm to a billion dollar-plus valuation, has beforehand displayed her abilities in such movie and tv tasks as Darkish Angel and the Unbelievable 4 and Sin Metropolis franchises. Manufacturing firm Thunder Highway boasts the John Wick and Sicario motion pictures amongst its credit. And its trio of screenwriters are answerable for such efforts as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, A Historical past of Violence and HBO’s Westworld.

Extra impressively, the movie options many ladies amongst its inventive staff, together with Indonesian director Mouly Surya (Marlina the Assassin in 4 Acts), making her English-language debut, and director of pictures Zoe White (The Handmaid’s Story). Sadly, regardless of everybody’s finest efforts to ship a femme-driven actioner revolving round a central character who comes throughout like a feminine Rambo, Set off Warning, premiering on Netflix, proves distressingly acquainted.

The badass bona fides of Alba’s character Parker, a Particular Forces commando, are instantly established within the opening scene wherein she’s seen effortlessly dispatching a number of terrorist sorts within the desert. She’s additionally proven to be honorable, demonstrated by her indignant response when one in every of her fellow troopers takes it upon himself to start out executing the prisoners and she or he violently places him in his place.

Not lengthy after, she’s knowledgeable that her father has been killed in a mine cave-in, prompting her return to her desert hometown with the symbolically less-than-subtle title of Creation. Not surprisingly, hassle follows her there, as she’s barely again on the town a day when she single-handedly foils a theft by subduing three dangerous guys, one in every of whom is brandishing an computerized weapon. She’s clearly an skilled fighter not solely with weapons, but additionally in hand-to-hand fight, with knives, and, as later prominently showcased, machetes.

If this weren’t an motion movie, Parker could be allowed to grieve for her father, settle for her mates’ condolences and presumably return to energetic obligation. No such luck. She involves suspect that the dying was no accident, suicide, or, as her former boyfriend-turned sheriff Jesse (Mark Webber, Inexperienced Room) suggests, a results of encroaching dementia.

Her suspicions change into right, as she uncovers a prison scheme to make use of the mine to steal weapons from a close-by army depot. Prominently figuring within the scheme is Jesse’s father (former teen star Anthony Michael Corridor, who’s aged into his villainous appears to be like), a corrupt senator — of a conservative bent, natch — and Jesse’s risky brother Elvis (Jake Weary).

For help, Parker enlists the assistance of her covert ops colleague Spider (humorist/actor Tone Bell), an skilled pc hacker, and Mike (Gabriel Basso), a neighborhood drug supplier who’s like a youthful brother to her.

The by-the-numbers storyline unfolds precisely as you’d anticipate, regardless of the trio of screenwriters’ makes an attempt to lend some quirkiness to the proceedings with such moments because the senator telling Parker that his great-grandfather was Native American. “It’s the place I get my lactose intolerance from,” he snidely factors out.

Largely, it’s an excuse for Alba to show her spectacular bodily health in a sequence of intense battle scenes, expertly choreographed within the type of method that means that you can see our bodies in movement reasonably than mere flying limbs in frenzied leap cuts.

Director Surya reveals an assured command of the shape, delivering sufficient satisfying bone-crushing and knife-wielding sequences to fulfill undemanding, action-craving viewers searching for senseless distraction on a weekend night time. Evidently, by the point Parker asks one in every of her feminine mates, “You wouldn’t by any probability have a bunch of weapons mendacity round someplace, would you?” all hell breaks unfastened.

Sadly, Alba, though greater than competent, doesn’t fairly have the full-bore charisma to make her character notably attention-grabbing, or, as Netflix presumably hopes, the catalyst for a brand new motion franchise. By the point the generically titled Set off Warning reaches its predictable conclusion, you’ll be hankering to see what the streamer’s all-knowing algorithms have in retailer for you subsequent.