Metacritic reviews

The shifting loyalties and treacherous power plays that go on in Triple 9 are engaging, but Hillcoat especially shines in a series of three taut life-or-death sequences — one at the start of the film, one near the middle, and one at the end — that articulate more about who these characters are than anything they say.

This is the anti-Heat: no sheen, no shimmer, no obsessing over highly grandiose themes and precise compositions; just grime and desperation.

There may be little here we haven’t seen before – glassy reflections of Michael Mann’s Heat pop up everywhere you look – but it’s all carried off with brashness and momentum by a director who genuinely seems to be having a blast.

Well suited to Hillcoat’s gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.

The interesting world of the film doesn’t get the story it deserves.

Individual scenes are charged with energy, tense confrontations are numerous, and Hillcoat and Cook's intentions were undoubtedly partly to tease and taunt viewers with uncertainly about where they, and the characters, stand, to figure out who's got the power and who doesn't. If it was possible to give a damn about any of them, it would help.

As well-handled as the set pieces are, the connective tissue doesn’t pull you along, and then collapses completely in a messy, unsatisfying final act.

Triple 9 becomes a victim of its own inane script. All the usual cop tropes are there - and that's part of the problem. Rarely does screenwriter Matt Cook throw anything at the page that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

The story is clotted and overloaded, lacking the necessary clean tautness and suspense. And Kate Winslet's turn as a hatchet-faced Russian mob matriarch is a bit on the ridiculous side.

A howlingly inane movie that somehow managed to collect an impressively A-list cast on its way toward becoming a cop movie that’s not just dumb, it’s disastrous.