Rebel Ridge is one film that could have been great in theaters, a pity why Netflix didn’t do just that. This movie is a lot better than most that are currently on show at the cinema. What better way to end the summer movie season than with such a crackerjack mainstream action thriller with a storyline as thrilling as it is thought-provoking? This sub-genre is Jeremy Saulnier’s forte – the writer and director of the above movie. Almost a decade ago, he helped predict the Trump’s America’s white nationalist obsession by making the movie Green Room. A terrible dark cage match of punk rock. The extreme violence seemed horrifyingly prophetic in an American society where many have exited the age of political correctness. It could not however be satisfying enough to have the smashing of fascist skinheads. Now that has changed. Saulnier has now made a one man vs multiple bad guys. Bad guys who are ex-policemen turned good and are using the law as a means of enraging oppression. It’s become First Blood for the ACAB movement.
Saulnier goes straight for the kill. As soon as we are introduced to Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), for example, he is riding a bicycle on a backroad with Iron Maiden blaring from his ears and is flung from his seat by the cruiser that has been following him from behind. It puts up short narratives but enlists and plays within the audience’s, first or second hand, understanding of Americans of Color, especially Blacks, and the assertion, applied to lights and sirens, instills. Out of attitude and in order to avoid arrest for, of course, bogus charges of attempting to evade arrest, Terry now engages in his trust, slowly parsing the affair so as not to expose himself to be blown away. Yet it does not help when he finds two cops arresting him and out of the blue, probe into his backpack where they find him a wincing 36,000 dollars in cash and proceed to justify their illogical and racially motivated prejudices, claiming it might be a part of a drug operation. “No way that can be lawful,” he whispers. As it happens, it’s become one.
From here on out the stakes and the suspense just increase progressively. The money, as it so happens, was meant to secure their release. Caught up on a misdemeanor possession on illegal drugs, Terry’s cousin is being transported to a state prison -something that could endanger the life of the younger man, considering his involvement in a previous gang murder case. So Terry goes after the money back and that is how he first comes across the good old boy police chief of then fictitious town Shelby Springs in Alabama. In a cheeky bit of miscasting, cowboy lawman’s significant other is portrayed by erstwhile TV narc Don Johnson. Aside from the Miami Vice associations, he is bloody good at this role – as the eventually bald head of the dirty cops, bullocking a small town and trying to rule with an iron fist and hating every bit of it.
Would it be fair to comment on the fact that Terry isn’t treated as your regular citizen without claiming that this is already a spoiler? Or to say that the boys in blue take a lion for a lamb? Saulnier is happy to demonstrate that this isn’t the case through an extremely well-deserved fight between the two at the precinct carpark intercutting to the cops inside finding out what Johnson’s leering man blew too soon on the outside. Pierre who infused a simmering rage in last years hardly seen Brother makes a perfect movie star performance in this one. There’s a leaden loosness in his measured serenity which appears to come from unrelenting inner moral horror. And when that time arrives, and Pierre has to go all Rambo, he does so with a captivating, almost choreographed gentleness that stands in perfect contrast to brute strength. The role reinvigrates an entertaining cliche: an almost devoid warrior who makes every effort to keep his unique skill tactic back.
Of course, Terry’s drama does not end with just battling a single corrupt police department. He is up against an entire system consisting of all bureaucrats – a cabal of paper-movers who prefer neutrality to action, a battery of clerks seeking loaves and fishes, a cadre of corrupt judges, and so on. Rebel Ridge zeroes in on civil asset forfeiture, the deeply infuriating legal practice of cops helping themselves to the possessions of private citizens without even the pretext of trying to charge them with a crime first, much less convict them. (One horrendous feature: the property is the suspect and its so-called defendants are no civil rights). This proper emphasis provides the film with a political engagement not uncommon in solitary suspense builders, quite conductor parallel to the terrorist group dominating the quiet menace – as if revealing injustice through artistic submission of the genres using a sole crusader in form of Stallone and Seagal and Norris films.
Rebel Ridge inhabits a world, as with its precedents, that skirts accountability relations 2020 or the American police state covers the proportions of social repudiation that has learnt to conceal itself in its abuses rather than deal with them and avoid change and the safeguards against its power breaches. Saulnier’s dialogue is full of wit and opposition – it’s a sustained series of pitched exchanges that escalates into drama. Nevertheless, it is also quite legitimately filled with the ethics of the hood, with the abbreviations and codes of officers who commit crimes, laced in more beautiful shades of scheming. Several acts, including the film’s captivating, explosive climax center on systems the bad guys get wise to, and more importantly, bypass such as their lead’s car surveillance devices. What is most precious in the movie Rebel Ridge is the status quo which is the unbridled and unassailable state apparatus.
Some of the film’s elements are by the book even more than needed. Terry’s only partner in his fight with the ruthless cops is a young attorney willing to help and also involved in a child custody case, as if one were reading a long-lost James Grisham novel. In her portrayal of AnnaSophia Robb, who is superficially sympathetic as well but serves almost a more orienting role rather than a fleshed out character, the least scene of the film was confusing. Similarly James Cromwell who pitches in after the fact to seal the loose ends of the jigsaw conspiracy and history dumps the exposition towards the end. These characters are stereotypes – but nevertheless, they do wedge nicely into Rebel Ridge’s clever, incisive take on cliché. It’s an agit-eight popcorn.
As in all other thrillers by Saulnier, including The Saree Blue Ruin or the failed sweatpants Hold the Dark, this one is also about escalation – almost touching whiplash at the end – warmongering, which means instigation. It is only about how far law enforcement & military will go in dealing with an angry mob, lowering the heat or overpowering everyone there. Rebel Ridge brings home the bacon when that one moment finally comes: The finale is a whirlwind of crossfire and is completely satisfying for it. Paradoxically, the lean muscle of the movie lies in what one of the characters calls pissing contests; the threats and intimidation and bargaining before the shooting. It is the intelligence work – a word that many do not have in the vocabulary of Jeremy Saulnier.
Decision
In the latest offering from Jeremy Saulnier, the director of Green Room, he may present his most commercial and possibly most entertaining thriller yet. The key character is an outsider played by the terrifically commanding Aaron Pierre, who falls victim to some policemen involved in a civil asset forfeiture scheme. The ensuing battle between lawman and vigilante, that has taken over the plot, is more than a clue to answer the question about how right could have been the first Sylvester Stallone movie about John Rambo, First Blood. That is, a filthy pic that nevertheless makes an incisive critique about American society. Saulnier exposes all the legal excesses that let the law enforcement subjugate the people in the expansion of police abuse of power, in addition to presenting the most hair-raising standoffs of the year. It’s what a modern crowd-pleaser should be – smart, gripping, and about something.
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