Triple Frontier, newly released on Netflix, is a superb military heist film in which a band of ex-military operatives reunite to rob a South American drug lord for their own personal gain. Of course, as is usually the case when one walks up to a drug lord’s den to rob him blind, things don’t quite go according to plan.

Triple Frontier’s greatest assets are its five main characters: Redfly (Ben Affleck), Pope (Oscar Isaac), Ironhead (Charlie Hunnam), Catfish (Pedro Pascal), and Ben (Garrett Hedlund). Like many other military films today that have shifted into a post-war narrative, this film portrays a group of men who are past their glory days of yelling “Hooah!” while storming the streets of Afghanistan or Iraq on a Black Hawk. These men have lost their edge, a result of prolonged exposure to a world where their skills are of no use. Redfly walks through life like a zombie; an ineffective real estate agent with no fire in his belly, with a failed marriage and a daughter he can’t afford to support. Ironhead gives motivational talks to dissuade service members from taking up private military contracts, Catfish is involved with drugs, and Ben is an amateur MMA fighter whose audience consists entirely of hillbillies. They’re all plodding through life…until Pope offers them a high-risk opportunity to steal millions from South American drug lord Lorea.

The setup sounds quite familiar, and by the time the team successfully steals more money than they ever imagined having, I was anticipating all the usual plot tropes that tend to permeate stories like this: the cartel hunts them down, gruesomely killing them off one by one, the surviving team members turn on each other in a blame game of “we should have never taken the money!”, the entire theft turns out to be a crafty manipulation by a previously unknown party, one team member survives by getting rid of all the money, and the entire ordeal serves as a lesson on the perils of robbing people, especially drug lords.

**SPOILERS BELOW**

To my surprise, Triple Frontier makes more than a few twists in the formula. There is no nefarious back stabbing or mysterious scheming to be revealed later on, the plot progresses in a linear manner, and what you see on the screen is exactly what you get. The film deliberately does this in order to focus on its five main characters and the manner in which they cope with their extraordinary situation. Of particular note is Ben Affleck’s nuanced portrayal of Redfly. Prior to the mission, he is wise and cautious, revered by his comrades as a master tactician who knows when a mission is not worth taking. After stealing more than enough money to support his family, however, the toll the real world has taken upon him reveals itself. He starts making rash decisions that put the team’s safety at risk, he guns down civilians the moment they try to take the money away from him, and he angrily lashes out at his mates when they question his decisions.

As the team begins its difficult quest to transport the money back to civilization, a sort of karmic push-and-pull starts to manifest. They are faced with a number of moral quandaries that test how far they are willing to go to keep the money, some of which are highly reminiscent of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In one notable scene that takes place after the team accidentally kills several farmers who tried to lay claim to the money, Pope apologizes to the village elder and gives him a sizable chunk of the cash as compensation for the dead, a scene straight out of the Afghan War in which U.S. forces paid villages in cash for accidentally killing local civilians. It’s demonstrative of how Triple Frontier tries to portray a group of  trained killers who try to dull the immorality of their quest as much as possible by doing the right thing whenever the opportunity presents itself, even if the right thing is only slightly less shitty than the other option. This moral balancing act is what drives the story forward, and it works well because the five mercenaries are so believable.

In the end, when it becomes clear that the only way they can keep the money is to kill even more people, the mercenaries elect to ditch most of the money, keeping only what they can carry in their backpacks in order to make a stealthy exit. Even so, they wind up donating all the money to the family of the one mercenary who does not live through the events, Redfly. Redfly also happens to be the only mercenary who allows his greed to outweigh his morality, but because this greed is driven by his familial devotion, the karmic equation within the film allows him, even in death, to save his family from poverty.

The karmic justice that dictates the fates of the five main characters is ever-present in many stories. Characters end up with outcomes that are proportional to their deeds over the course of the story; evil characters die horribly, while heroic characters have happy or noble endings, more so if they undergo a dramatic arc. In Triple Frontier‘s case, Pope, who is driven by greed at first but later comes to value his friends more than money, gets the best ending of all. In many other stories, this kind of storytelling technique can be a cliche, but Triple Frontier uses it to unique effect, dispensing the overwhelming cynicism that pervades modern military movies in favor of a slightly more optimistic tone in which the characters’ devotion to each other grants them rewards that are more than material.