Don't cry over spilled money

The following post contains spoilers for Triple Frontier.

I don't think of myself as a materialistic person. I can let go of money pretty easily, and don't tend to buy anything that qualifies as a trophy or an object of its own inherent worth. I haven't made a single decision in my career that has been focused on the acquisition of any more money than I already have. Why do you think I tried to make it for a while as a paid film critic?

All that said, few things upset me more in a movie than the loss, destruction or wanton dispersal of money.

I suppose I'm exaggerating with my language here. Plenty of things upset me more, like disease, mass death or the death of a child. Of course those things.

But few inconsequential things bother me more than when a box full of millions of dollars explodes and the tattered bills flutter down into the ocean.

That's an actual example from Lethal Weapon 2, which was the first time I noticed this bothering me. I haven't seen that movie in ages, but I clearly remember that a ton of cash is scattered to the winds and water in the finale. It made me ill. I mean, not really, but it made me shake my head slowly in sorrow.

Among the plenty of other examples, another comes to mind. That's The Dark Knight, where to prove how much he is governed by the insane principles of anarchy, the Joker stacks what seems like a billion dollars and sets it aflame. Just because.

In Triple Frontier, which I watched last night, it happens like nine different times. And here's where the spoilers begin.

The first instance is the burning of the drug lord's safe house, where the team of retired special ops soldiers has found hundreds of millions of dollars in the walls, a la the dead bodies in Sicario only more valuable. Because of their short window of opportunity, they can only take what they have the time to dig out, leaving untold millions going up in smoke.

Then there's their escape through the Andes by helicopter. Because of the extra cash they gathered, the helicopter can't support the full weight of their booty and also reach the necessary altitudes to clear the mountains. They therefore have to toss a number of duffel bags down from the interior of the chopper into the jungle to reduce the strain on the aircraft.

This isn't enough, though, and a gearbox explodes, leaving the helicopter in a position to crash land. In order to allow for the landing, they have to drop the net bag carrying the vast majority of their ill-gotten gains. This is largely recovered, but in the moment it was another head-shaking loss of funds.

As they are traversing a very thin ledge through the mountains, one of the mules carrying several bags containing probably tens of millions loses its footing and goes down the side of the mountain. This is the shot that most closely resembles the shot in Lethal Weapon 2, as the bills billow out and fall to the distant ground like so much confetti. To show what good guys they are (the film really waffles on this one), they take a moment to mourn the loss of the mule as well.

As it's extremely cold and the guys have no other reasonable kindling, they also burn some of the money. This struck me as the least believable case of loss/destruction in the whole film, given that greed has motivated almost everything they have done to this point. (Another area where the film waffles.)

Lastly, when they are facing huge odds as vengeful locals wait for them with machine guns, they must reduce their burden to only what they can carry in their backpacks, throwing the rest of the money down into the bottom of a ravine.

By the end of this I was almost numb.

I'm overstating this a bit, and besides, some of the money that's "lost" is not destroyed or unrecoverable -- it'll just be recovered by South American locals who surely deserve it more.

Still, I was triggered.

Good thing I myself have never lost more than $20 here and there. I don't know how I'd handle it.