Rebel Ridge
It’s a shame Netflix didn’t bring Rebel Ridge to theaters, because it puts almost everything else playing on the big screen right now to, well, shame. What better way to end the summer movie season than with a crackerjack mainstream action thriller as politically resonant as it is breathlessly suspenseful? Jeremy Saulnier, the film’s writer and director, specializes in such genre anomalies. Nearly a decade ago, he foreshadowed the rise of white nationalism in Trump’s America with Green Room, a terrifying punk-rock cage match whose violence came to look both nightmarishly prophetic and – in the literal disemboweling of neo-Nazi scum – cathartically gratifying. Now Saulnier has made a one-man-army movie where the bad guys are supposedly reformed cops using legal protocol to abuse their power. It’s basically First Blood (the first Rambo film) for the ACAB age.
Saulnier tightens the screws immediately. No sooner have we met Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), biking down a backroad with Iron Maiden blaring in his ears, than he’s intentionally launched out of his seat by the cruiser trailing him. This opening sequence plays tensely on the audience’s knowledge, first- or secondhand, of the danger flashing lights so often portend for Americans of color. Politely complying with the officers threatening a bogus evading-arrest charge, Terry performs a delicate dance of asserting his rights while taking care not to get his head blown off. But he can’t entirely suppress his outrage when the two cops uncover and seize $36,000 in cash from his backpack under the shaky, racist pretense that it might be part of a drug-related conspiracy. “This can’t be legal,” he mutters. Unfortunately, in too much of the country, it is.
The stakes and suspense steadily mount from here. The money, as it turns out, was for bail. Picked up on misdemeanor possession, Terry’s cousin is facing transport to a state prison – a development that could put the younger man’s life in danger, given his earlier cooperation with a gang-related homicide case. So Terry goes to get the money back, and quickly runs afoul of the good ol’ boy police chief of fictional Alabama town Shelby Springs. The cowboy lawman is played, in a subversive bit of star casting, by one-time TV narc Don Johnson. Beyond the Miami Vice associations, it’s a superbly villainous performance – the dirty cop as petty local tyrant, offended by any challenge to his absolute authority.
Does it qualify as a spoiler to say that Terry isn’t exactly an ordinary citizen? Or that the boys in blue have mistaken a lion for a lamb? Saulnier reveals the truth via a highly satisfying mano-a-mano showdown in the precinct parking lot, crosscutting to the officers inside discovering what Johnson’s grinning hardass learns too late on the outside. Pierre delivers a true movie-star turn here. His commanding calm seems to emerge from his quaking moral disbelief. And when it comes time to unleash his inner Rambo, Pierre moves with a graceful, literally disarming physicality that’s the pointed opposite of blunt force. The performance breathes new life into a winning archetype: the almost pacifistic action hero, trying his damndest to avoid utilizing his particular set of skills.
Of course, Terry isn’t just fighting one corrupt police force. He’s fighting a whole bureaucratic system – a network of pencil-pushers willing to look the other way, of clerks protecting their own jobs and lives, of judges on the take. Rebel Ridge locks its crosshairs on civil asset forfeiture, the enraging legal process in which cops seize private property at their own discretion, without the need to even charge those they’re robbing with a crime. (One horrifying detail: The “defendant” in such cases is the property itself, which of course has no civil rights.) This particular focus lends the movie a sharp political conscience that few lone-wolf thrillers of its sort possess; it’s as if Saulnier is using the populist, one-man-against-the-Man mechanics of Stallone and Seagal and Norris vehicles to put real miscarriages of justice on trial.
Rebel Ridge exists in a post-2020 world of skirted accountability, surveying an American police state that hasn’t so much reckoned with its transgressions as learned to better cover its ass, sidestep reform measures, and find loopholes in the checks put on its power. Saulnier’s dialogue is witty and adversarial – a sharp shoptalk delivered across a series of increasingly loaded verbal standoffs. But it’s also authentically peppered with the acronyms and codes that make up the conspiratorial language of criminals with badges. Several sequences, including the film’s breathtaking, slam-bang climax, hinge on systems the villains have learned to circumvent, like their automatic dashcams. What’s really at stake in Rebel Ridge is the status quo of an unchecked, unrivaled law enforcement.
Some aspects of the film are conventional but that isn’t a bad thing. Terry’s sole ally in his struggle against the crooked authorities is a budding lawyer with a conscience and a custody battle, like the heroine of a forgotten John Grisham novel. As played by AnnaSophia Robb, she’s likable but more of a plot device than a multi-dimensional person. Likewise James Cromwell, who shows up to tie together the loose strands of the conspiracy plot with an eleventh-hour exposition dump. These are stock characters – but then, they fit snugly into Rebel Ridge’s smart, pointed riff on formula. It’s agitation propaganda by way of a popcorn classic.
Like most of Saulnier’s thrillers (including the grimly comic Blue Ruin and the just plain grim Hold the Dark), this one is a study in escalation, steadily simmering a conflict between two opposing parties to an explosive boil. But it’s also about escalation – which is to say, how the police and military approach a potentially volatile situation, lowering the temperature or trying to resolve it with pure force. Rebel Ridge delivers the goods when the time comes: The finale is a chaotic blaze of crossfire, and enormously satisfying for it. But the taut power of the movie lies in what one character calls the “pissing contests,” a.k.a. the threats and intimidations and negotiations that preface the shooting. The calm before the storm – that’s where the action’s at in a Jeremy Saulnier movie.
