Jessica Alba Wages War on Criminals

Jessica Alba unleashes her inner Rambo in “Trigger Warning,” wherein her active U.S. military officer gets pulled homeward by tragedy, only to uncover corruption she’ll have to clean up before leaving again. Indonesian director Mouly Surya’s well-crafted first English-language feature is too formulaically contrived to qualify as “elevated genre” or to boast the personal stamp of her prior work. Still, it’s an entertaining, pacey action melodrama that should do well for Netflix, where it launches on June 21.

After two intriguingly conceived but somewhat vague initial features, Surya made an assertive impression with 2018’s “Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts.” That striking “feminist outlaw Western” distinctively juggled elements of revenge thriller, black comedy and character-driven social critique. Her more conventionally commercial American debut is another vengeance tale driven by a strong-willed, capable female protagonist. But this is also the first film on which Surya has not had a hand in the screenplay. The one she’s been handed (credited to “John Brancato & Josh Olson and Haley Gross”) offers a viable if familiar pileup of perilous complications that make for a comparatively impersonal end result. 

We first meet Special Forces commando Parker Calvo (Alba) in Syria, where she and a driver are trying to outrun enemy fire in the desert. Their mission is left murky, but in any case she alone survives it, only to be…