A few bad apples
Would you look at that — another Netflix release that would have played great as a wide release on the big screen!
Rebel Ridge is the latest from Jeremy Saulnier, acclaimed thriller-maker best known for Green Room. This is actually my first Saulnier joint, but it won’t be my last. You can, and should, read that last sentence as an affirmation that Rebel Ridge is worth watching. And yet I feel a nagging ache with regards towards the film. There’s some missed potential here. It walks right up to the threshold of greatness, then faceplants on the doormat. It’s still one of the most enjoyable films of the year so far, a large-scale success, but I have enough aggregate nitpicks to prevent me from getting too gung-ho in my enthusiasm.
The film is a vigilante revenge story. We meet Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) as he’s biking down the road listening to heavy metal blasted in his earphones. He gets ambushed by some cops who seize the pile of cash he has in his backpack, ostensibly on the grounds that they believe it is drug money, though he has a clear source and use for it: He sold a stake in a restaurant he co-owned to get bail money for his cousin.
When Richmond goes to the police station to reclaim his money, he gets jerked around and intimidated by the police chief Sandy Burne (Don Johnson) who fails to realize that Richmond is not just an ex-Marine, but a hand-to-hand combat trainer who specializes in incapacitating armed opponents. It turns out that this is a very handy background to have when your “opponents” are a corrupt police force!
After this terrific first act, the film slows down a gear as it builds towards the final confrontation. Richmond gradually uncovers that the cops’ racially-charged corruption runs deep in a surprisingly complicated crime story — this is no barebones structure as a vehicle for some great action scenes, but pretty balanced blend of narrative and set pieces. Along the way, Richmond partners with law clerk Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb) to dig to the core of the rot.
There’s a lot that works in this film, and you can start with the lead performance. Pierre is absolutely sensational as the quiet-but-tough Terry Richmond. You’d believe this actor had been kicking ass on the big screen for a decade rather than having a resume of mostly prestige TV drama. He’s a convincing badass with steely presence and physicality, an intimidating and graceful force in the action scenes where he does stuff like rip the wire out of a taser as he’s getting zapped. But he also delivers his lines with cool confidence and charisma. Great breakout turn by Pierre.
I also mostly like the story backing it. It offers a steady drip of twists and conspiratorial intrigue that is vintage thriller storytelling. So much of the language and tone indicate that this is a post-George Floyd story, but it feels less ripped-from-the-headlines than it might have. The script is not so political or didactic as you might fear. It’s somehow both fair and uncompromising: It doesn’t, for instance, assume that the viewer is pre-exposed and in support of all ACAB invective, nor does it offer any Blue Lives Matter apologia; it’s squarely DNC-core centrism.
Saulnier’s fight scenes are pretty outstanding too. There’s something about them that really keeps me hooked: I think it’s a combination of their narrative purpose — they’re always urgently necessary in the story, no shorter or longer than they ought be — and their terrific construction. They’re easy to follow and smoothly flowing, a nice middle ground between blunt and balletic.
But I opened this review saying I had a lot of small-to-medium sized hangups with Rebel Ridge that keep it just short of being a genuinely great film, and here they are: First of all, not to harp on a topic that comes up in about 75% of my reviews, but this film is too long. It’s 130 minutes and it tells a story that would have fit better in about 105. Why do good filmmakers keep making this mistake? The first act is taut, but then it hits a repetitive cadence: Richmond confronts the cops, then retreats and regroups, and repeat. It happens like 5 times before the big climax, whose impact is diminished because we’ve already had so many face-offs in the meantime. The film is never less than compulsively watchable, but the tension inevitably deflates a bit as we’re waiting and waiting for the grand finale and comeuppance.
And as much as I appreciate that it’s not overtly preachy, it bugs me how damn hard it tries to be nice about everything. The straddling between “cops are systemically evil” and “we must not harm cops” is a bit dissonant (and, just to clarify, “DNC-core” is a diss in my book). Nobody seems to want to kill anyone: The cops mug and threaten and tase, but keep letting Richmond walk away. Richmond, meanwhile, leans so hard on his non-lethal “incapacitating” that it starts to feel silly. At one point he fires a close-range shotgun-style gun at a corrupt cop, then announces: “Don’t worry, it’s a beanbag shot!” Just in case we were worried he’d spilled blood in this R-rated action film.
Lastly, I find the ending to be the one real big exception to the film’s otherwise steady-handed, non-message-focused tone. It’s almost like a punchline how abruptly the climax of the film shifts in tenor from “punchy” to “preachy,” to the point that I didn’t even understand that we were supposed to take it at face value. Sour note to go out on.
(And since I’m picking apart the ending… There’s a major driving element of the climax driven by behavior of automated cameras activating that not only makes so little sense I could barely follow it but contradicts what we’d learned earlier in the film, if I understood it correctly.)
All that said, Rebel Ridge is pretty undeniably good. And it occasionally gets further than that. When you see the rating below, understand that I’m giving the film the benefit of the doubt because of how much it hooked me. I made the mistake of hitting play during a lunch break. I hope my coworkers don’t mind I skipped my next two meetings.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
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6 replies on “Rebel Ridge (2024)”
See, I actually liked the non-lethality of the action scenes! I say this as someone who loves his blood squibs: I thought it spoke to the characterisation of Terry as someone with tremendous self-discipline and situational awareness, that he’s able to fulfill his objectives without resorting to lethal violence. Rebel Ridge is as much a power fantasy as other action movies, but its a fantasy of a different type. Like, our guy is playing on hard mode, and he’s still winning.
Agreed that it could have used some tighter pacing, though.
Hey, Terminator 2’s pretty cool.
I have also historically liked Saulnier’s laconically violent movies (though I skipped the one about… wolves, possibly werewolves, whatever it was, the previous Netflix one).
Alright, I admit you have me stumped on the Terminator reference. How does that connect?
Also an R-rated action film where the main characters go out of their way not to kill anyone.
Ah, but John Connor made him fight all those cops, but also promise not to kill them.
Or, you know, what Andrew said.