Triple Threat  ★★½

BRINGING together three of Asia’s top action cinema stars should be a winner, right?

Unfortunately not, in the case of Triple Threat.

The film stars Thailand’s Tony Jaa (Ong-bak), China’s Tiger Hu Chen (The Matrix) and Indonesia’s Iko Uwais (The Raid).

All are incredible exponents of martial arts and there are plenty of examples of each displaying their talents.

But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – these action sequences don’t bring anything new to the screen. Yes, they’re good, but these men have separately been involved in some of the greatest action scenes ever to the modern screen.

All the scenes in Triple Threat do is recall better ones from better films.

The film looks rushed. The story is slight, even for an action movie, and the direction plodding. For the fight scenes it’s almost as if they were just left to get on with it.

Jaa, Chen and Uwais are fighters first and actors second; always will be. Here they are asked to do more heavy lifting than their talents allow in order to elevate the material. They needed more assistance from the script and behind the camera.

They also needed a super foe to counter-balance their talents. Unfortunately what we get is Scott Adkins, one of the worst actors working today.

What’s it about? Well it actually starts promisingly.

A group of mercenaries are in Thailand attacking a camp to free some prisoners. Unknown to two of their number, Payu (Jaa) and Long Fei (Chen), they are in the pay of a criminal gang.

They free a man named Collins (Adkins) and start killing everyone in the camp and surrounding village, including the wife of villager Jaka (Uwais).

Payu and Long Fei are horrified but you don’t get to see this at first. In fact you just see Payu and Jaka fighting and Jaka wrongly blaming the innocent men.

The full story is revealed in flashback later, which is a confusing device that doesn’t work and constantly disrupts the flow of the narrative.

Anyway, in the end all three get over the misunderstandings and team up, but not before ongoing confusion caused by the construction of the film.

There’s not much point going further into the story; suffice to say it’s par for the course.

Even action fans are likely to be disappointed with this one.