Matt Damon and Ben Affleck lead the cast in director Joe Carnahan’s terrific crime thriller. Our review of The Rip, now on Netflix: A dead division captain. A house with walls stuffed full of cash. A group of tired, wired detectives working after hours, unsure whom to trust. Writer-director Joe Carnahan sets up an attention ... The Rip review | It’s a crime this thriller isn’t being shown in cinemas
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck lead the cast in director Joe Carnahan’s terrific crime thriller. Our review of The Rip, now on Netflix:
A dead division captain. A house with walls stuffed full of cash. A group of tired, wired detectives working after hours, unsure whom to trust.
Writer-director Joe Carnahan sets up an attention grabbing premise in The Rip, one purportedly based on a true story. And while it has occasional jabs of action and generous helpings of machismo, it also presents a rare dip into the mystery thriller genre for the filmmaker behind such films as Narc and Smokin’ Aces.
In essence, it’s as much a whodunnit as Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies, and it’s likely that it’s this mystery element that prompted Netlix to step in and buy the rights to The Rip in 2024. From the streaming giant’s perspective, it’s a wise purchase.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck star as, respectively, Dumars and Byrne; two middle-aged cops based in Miami, Florida. Members of a specialist narcotics team, they’re only just coming to terms with the murder of their captain when they get an anonymous tip: a nearby house hides an unspecified sum of cartel money.
Dumars and Byrne gather their subordinates, among them detectives Ro (Steven Yeun) and Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and loveable sniffer dog Wilbur, and call at the house to make a potential seizure – the ‘Rip’ of the film’s title.
At first, the occupant, Desiree (Sasha Calle) plays the innocent – until a few thumps on a wall with a sledgehammer reveal the hidden loot. Far more loot than Dumars was expecting: $20m. The kind of money that cartel goons and cops alike would kill each other to get their hands on.
Sensing danger, Dumars tries to lock the scene down – but it isn’t long before the detectives all begin to become suspicious of each other…
From a brief, bullet-strewn opening, Carnahan keeps the tension simmering. ‘Trust’ is a word that you’ll hear a lot in the terse, acronym-strewn dialogue, as we see just how little love is lost between departments. Byrne has a tense relationship with his FBI agent brother, Del (Scott Adkins); DEA agent Nix talks disparagingly to the narcotics division, while they poke fun at his team’s outsized firearms and gigantic armoured truck.
There’s a likeable chemistry between the cast, particularly between Damon and Affleck, whose real-life working relationship traces back to the 1990s and their breakthrough success with Good Will Hunting. It’s easy to believe that they’re two old buddies, sticking together even as they years on the job have begun to tell; both bearded and grouchy, Byrne requiring a pair of reading glasses to look at his mobile phone.
By the time we get to the stash house in the middle of an ominously quiet suburb, Carnahan has managed to cleanly distinguish all his characters and their potential motivations – all while keeping things just off-kilter enough that we’re as suspicious of them as they are of each other. One cop talks about the amount of danger and violence they have to put up with for their annual salary; another expresses their disquiet at the way Dumars is handling the whole investigation.
Eventually – inevitably – The Rip’s events turn deadly, and Carnahan handles this half of the movie like a season pro, too: there are hints of John Carpenter’s exploitation classic Assault On Precinct 13 as faceless assailants descend on the house. The action is concise and legible, but never gets in the way of The Rip’s core theme: who can we trust? More specifically, in a world of impenetrable ethical murk, can we trust a cop who insists he’s one of the good guys?
Much has been written about streaming movies as second-screen entertainment – of movies being over-simplified for a streaming audience. Certainly, Netflix has put out more than its fair share of middling thrillers that feel designed to be background noise while audiences scroll through their phones.
The Rip doesn’t feel like one of those movies. You could pick at the dialogue here and there, but it’s arguably the best-crafted thriller to emerge on Netflix for some time; certainly since Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge from 2024. It’s another of those films that is so good to look at, and so entertaining, that it feels galling that it didn’t get at least a few weeks in cinemas. We can almost hear audiences gasp at some of the twists and turns here.
The silver lining, though, is that when Netflix signed the deal for The Rip, its production company – Damon and Affleck’s Artists Equity – ensured that, if the film fares well enough with subscribers, the streamer will also pay a bonus to everyone who worked on the movie, irrespective of whether they were a producer or a clapper loader.
It’s proof that there are still one or two good guys left in this world of robbers and thieves.
The Rip is streaming now on Netflix.
