Watch Jessica Alba defeat chainsaw-wielding hitman in action-packed “Trigger Warning ”trailer

The action movie fan "wanted to see the women kicking ass instead of always being saved."

In her new movie, Trigger Warning, Jessica Alba had the chance to play the kind of role she enjoys watching.

"I loved Die Hard. I loved Star Wars. I loved Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, all these movies I grew up with," Alba tells Entertainment Weekly, "but I always felt like I wanted to see the women kicking ass instead of always being saved."

There's plenty of that here, judging from the exclusive new trailer of the movie (below) from producers of Sicario and John Wick. The audience sees Alba wielding a blade and fighting off a man with a chainsaw, among other badass moves.

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Alba stars as Parker, a special forces commando who leaves active duty overseas to come home after her father dies suddenly. Now the owner of her family's bar, she finds herself reconnecting with her former boyfriend, Jesse (Mark Webber), who's now the sheriff, as well as his brother Elvis (Jake Weary) and his powerful and possibly sinister father, Sen. Swann, played by Anthony Michael Hall. During all this, she tries to find the truth about what happened to her father.

According to the official description: "Parker's search for answers quickly goes south, and she soon finds herself at odds with a violent gang running rampant in her hometown. Unsure of who she can truly trust, Parker draws on her commando training and proves herself a force to be reckoned with as she hunts down the truth and attempts to right what has gone wrong in Swann County with the help of her covert ops partner and hacker Spider (Tone Bell) and connected local dealer Mike (Gabriel Basso)."

While it's Alba's first foray into the genre in a few years, she's a veteran of physically intense TV series, including L.A.'s Finest and Dark Angel, as well as movies like Fantastic Four, Sin City, Machete, and Into the Blue. She also notes that she trained under action auteur James Cameron, who co-created Dark Angel. Still, she had to prepare intensely for Trigger Warning, working with experienced stunt-coordinator teams and learning to wield an Indonesian-inspired machete.

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The movie was directed by Mouly Surya, who had been impressed by Alba since she saw her on Dark Angel.

"Jessica is an actress with strong instincts," Surya tells EW. "She has the ability to carry herself well in physically demanding scenes with immense motivation and her own flair, adding another layer to the character of Parker. She's not just quick and precise, but she also brings a fiery energy. Jessica also possesses a unique femininity and emotional range that I wanted to portray in Parker, qualities that we rarely see in a female action hero."

Once Alba was all set to take on the role, she set about the intense training required.

"I probably worked out five or six days a week," Alba says. "When you go from not doing it at all and then wanting to be fit and ready and be able to pop up and... make it believable, having to be a trained special forces commando, you can't look like someone who's been sitting at a desk for 10 years."

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Alba easily connected to her character mentally, too, specifically the sense of loss she felt. While they were working on the final version of the script, her grandfather died.

"So it was pretty easy for me at that time to access that, just that sadness that comes with grief and losing someone and how it can kind of catch you by surprise," Alba says. "And then also I think her real drive and desire to figure out the truth because she just knew intuitively that something was up, that something was wrong. And I think so many times we're told that our instincts aren't right and not to press our intuition. And so it was also pretty nice to be able to play someone who not only trusts her intuition, but she leans hard into it and really doesn't care what other people think, because I feel like not a lot of us do that."

One of Alba's costars in the project was former Brat Pack star Anthony Michael Hall of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Here, though, he plays a much different role than he did in those '80s movies.

"I was aware of him and grew up watching those movies, Alba said. "But he was so intense and so good as Senator Swann, he was never confusing. He was never... the funny, nerdy kid from the '80s movies."

Trigger Warning is available June 21 on Netflix.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.