From director Jeremy Saulnier comes an action thriller with a star-making turn from Aaron Pierre. Our review of Rebel Ridge, on Netflix now:
Riding into view like a heavy metal riff on Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood, Rebel Ridge has one of the most electrifying openings of any thriller uploaded to Netflix so far. Ex-soldier Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is swept off his bike by a police patrol car and insistently questioned by the two law enforcement officers who scrape him off the tarmac. Where’s he headed? What’s with the military tattoos? Why does he have over $30,000 in cash stuffed into his bag?
It turns out Terry has a good reason to be carrying the cash: he’s on his way to a Louisiana courthouse to bail out his younger cousin, recently arrested for marijuana possession. If Terry doesn’t post bail by 5pm, then his cousin goes to prison, where a grisly fate awaits. None of this matters to those two bull-necked, bearded cops, who seize the money on the flimsy argument that it’s laundered drug money.
Calmly at first, Terry tries his damnedest to get the cash back, only to discover that the theft is essentially legal; civil asset forfeiture, as AnnaSophia Robb’s trainee lawyer Summer explains in a local cafe, was introduced to “help the feds fight cartels” but can also be used against individual civilians if there’s the slightest suspicion that narcotics are involved.
Terry’s desperation soon puts him in conflict with small town police chief Burnne (an enjoyably unseemly Don Johnson), who takes a sadistic pleasure in asserting his dominance over the young drifter in his midst. As Terry’s attempts to peacefully resolve the situation are thwarted, he reluctantly considers using stronger means to free his cousin.
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s premise is the stuff of a million action thrillers, but he’s the filmmaker behind such wryly effective pieces as Blue Ruin and Green Room, so he constantly plays around with genre conventions. Right away, essentially reworking First Blood as the story of an African American versus a bunch of (mostly) white small town cops gives it an intense political charge. Nobody says anything overtly racist in Rebel Ridge, but the toxicity is there in the smirks, the barbed comments, and the generally scornful way Terry’s treated; and the more he’s belittled and jerked around, the more we can see the rage building behind his eyes.
John Boyega was originally set to play Terry, but he abruptly left the production in 2021 under murky circumstances; in his place, Pierre later stepped in, which might be one of the most consequential bits of re-casting since Michael J Fox took over from Eric Stoltz on Back To The Future.
Pierre is, quite simply, dynamite: his performance brings depth and nuance to what could have been a stock, sub-Jack Reacher action figure. Like Stallone’s John Rambo, he’s a loner who’s adept at living off the land, while his military training makes him a force of nature that Burnne and his little band of out-of-shape cops are ill-prepared to fight. He’s effective as a physical performer, but most importantly, hypnotically watchable in his verbal confrontations with Don Johnson. (His off-hand utterance of, “I’m thinking… nah,” was a showstopper in the trailer and even more powerful in the film itself.)
For at least the first hour, Rebel Ridge is almost flawless, Saulnier expertly setting up the stakes and letting the tension build. You can see the strength of his direction in the understated way his opening plays out, right down to the sound of a dragonfly’s wings as it buzzes off a simmering highway. There’s also a genuine rush to a brief scene where Terry uses his panther-like strength to keep his pushbike level with a moving prison bus.
Then, as the plot begins to reach what feels like a crescendo, Rebel Ridge’s second half becomes distracted by the minutiae of police corruption. And while it’s easy to see the intent here, as Saulnier lays out a plausible map of systemic rot that probably isn’t all that uncommon in real-world America, the sense of ebbing tension is palpable.
The first half suggests all that corruption so effectively that stopping to pick apart how it works in such forensic detail feels like overkill. It’d be like if the original Star Wars spent half an hour in the middle explaining exactly what metals were used to construct the Death Star; we don’t need to know how it’s made, we just need to know how deadly it is.
Even with these flaws, Rebel Ridge remains one of the more memorable thrillers to appear exclusively on Netflix in years. It’s undoubtedly a league above those broadly identical Mission: Impossible pretenders the platform spends hundreds of millions on, with characters worth rooting for and dialogue that shows flashes of dry wit. Saulnier again proves himself to be one of the most accomplished genre filmmakers currently working, while Pierre may yet emerge from the movie as a bona fide star. Yes, he’s really that good.
Rebel Ridge is streaming now on Netflix.
