After a crackling start, Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge, Netflix’s latest original hit, falters. Its director doesn’t seem sure what kind of movie it should be, or how realistically it should present the consequences of unjust policing. This uncertainty compromises its effectiveness both as an entertainment and as a work of social consciousness.
The movie stars Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, a former nonlethal combat trainer for the U.S. Marine Corps. As the film opens, Terry is biking to Shelby Springs, Louisiana, with $36,000 in cash to bail out his cousin from the local jail. When cops detain him on false pretenses, Terry does everything he knows he’s supposed to do as a Black man to avoid police brutality. He’s polite, calm, patient, and respectful. The cops let him go, but they seize his money, supposedly because they believe it’s illicit, but really because they are little more than shakedown artists with badges.
Note: This article contains spoilers for Rebel Ridge and other films.
The movie starts out as intensely political
The opening scenes dramatize two major issues with American law enforcement: What Black people face at the hands of (mostly) white policemen in America. And the very real issue of civil asset forfeiture, where law enforcement can seize private property on the suspicion that it’s illicit, without ever arresting or charging the owner — and never return it. It’s a provocative start for a mainstream action movie to engage these polarizing hot-button issues with this degree of realism.
Terry needs his money back badly. His cousin is due to be transferred to the local prison for holding in a few days, where Terry fears he will be killed by the mob while in custody. He goes to the police station and asks for just enough returned to him to pay the bail. Though the local police chief (Don Johnson in vintage form, channeling every racist small-town cop in the history of the movies) insults and threatens him, Terry is able to make a deal to spring his cousin. Things go from bad to worse when he returns the next morning to discover that the chief has betrayed him. Before long, the cousin is killed.
Rebel Ridge isn’t Rambo
With the tension near boiling, it seems like a foregone conclusion that the movie will enter the familiar territory of First Blood and similar films where the wronged veteran takes on the small-town cops in a private war. The irony of First Blood, of course, is that John Rambo kills his countrymen with the skills he’s acquired to defend them. Rambo became so associated with Reagan-era values that it’s easy to forget he was initially a long-haired drifter resisting the lawmen who would trample the rights he sacrificed so much to protect.
Terry finds himself in a similar situation when his status as a distinguished former Marine affords him little respect. With the viewer’s sense of outrage piqued by the police corruption, they are primed to live vicariously through a bloody tale of justifiable revenge. It’s the sort of dramatic situation that can get viewers questioning how much violence they are willing to tolerate in the face of injustice.
Parallels with Saulnier’s other films
Another reason it seems as though Saulnier will embrace blood-drenched retribution is because he’s done so in his past movies: the effective micro-budget revenge thriller Blue Ruin (also featuring an excellent Don Johnson performance), Hold the Dark, and Green Room.
Green Room, about a punk band targeted by Oregon skinheads after they witness a murder, is a freak show of gore and sadism. It’s horrifying, yet brilliantly well-made — on par with a chilling masterwork like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Both movies unflinchingly present the worst of humanity from a sociological remove, feeling no need to offer commentary.
Hold the Dark, which stars Jeffrey Wright as a wolf expert who travels to Alaska to help solve a mystery, is not quite as visceral as Green Room (few films are). But it also features graphic violence, as well as a bloody shootout between locals and rural law enforcement (the cops are the good guys in this one). The shootout, in which a dozen cops are torn to shreds by an M-60, is as well-staged as any since the famous bank robbery gunfight in Heat, and the carnage is even more brutal.
Despite this onscreen history — or perhaps because of it — Saulnier has said in interviews he wanted to make a movie less driven by killing than his previous films. Terry, therefore, is no cop killer. He specializes in no-lethal combat, disabling his opponents with martial arts, bean bag cannons, tear gas, etc. It’s commendable that Terry refuses to kill, though it does seem to soften the film a bit. If this is Saulnier’s strategy to get the viewer to consider their own desire for onscreen bloodlust, then he’s successful, but it blunts the impact of the film’s overall message.
Ill-fitting genres
Instead of fleeing to the woods to drop from trees onto the heads of his enemy (Roger Ebert joked that Rambo always seems to know exactly which tree the villain will stop underneath), Rebel Ridge‘s Terry enters into a partnership with a court clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), and together they peel back the layers of corruption in local law enforcement, showing how the entire town is funded by civil asset forfeiture. The middle acts attempt to weave the labyrinth mystery plot of a movie like L.A. Confidential. Perhaps as a nod to Curtis Hanson’s 1997 masterpiece, James Cromwell, who played the corrupt police captain in that film, even appears as a compromised judge in Rebel Ridge.
It’s an uneasy alliance of genres, but this approach has precedence in Saulnier’s work. Hold the Dark is also a genre mash-up: crime thriller, supernatural mystery, and wilderness adventure film, with bits of Iraq War movie thrown in for good measure. Like Rebel Ridge, it’s compelling, even gripping, for long stretches. Also, like Rebel Ridge, never quite coalescing around one genre compromises its effectiveness.
The mystery unfolding at the center or Rebel Ridge also drags down the pace. The charged tension of the opening act prevents the viewer from asking obvious questions about the plot, like where is Terry riding his bike all the way from? Wouldn’t a rental car have made more sense given the distance he has to travel? If he’s had a brilliant career as a Marine combat trainer, why is he now trying to save his pennies working at a Chinese restaurant? The owner of the restaurant, while patching up Terry’s gunshot wound, is revealed to have been a medic during the Korean War. But wouldn’t that make him something like 95 years old?
The shift to investigative story not only slackens the tension and diverts the viewer’s attention with such questions, it undercuts the earlier realism that has made the racist policing and civil asset forfeiture feel so urgent and awful.
This begs the question of how political should a movie like this be? Netflix feature productions aren’t exactly known for their social consciousness or political provocation, though Saulnier has said he wrote the screenplay with Tony Gilroy’s 2007 movie, Michael Clayton, in mind. But few films balance thriller elements with social/political commentary as deftly as that film does, and it’s a feat Gilroy pulled off again with the first season of Andor (he’s really good at it). Rebel Ridge leans into the politics, but not far enough, or with the right balance, to be the blisteringly realistic takedown of social ills it starts out as.
The ending doesn’t add up
The ending is a big letdown, not only because it fails to honor the maverick spirt seen in the beginning, but because it also seems like a direct rebuke of Saulnier’s earlier work. The survivors in Green Room are happy to kill the people that killed their friends. There is no theme that violence can lead to empathy or destroy one’s soul. In Hold the Dark, the killers escape unpunished into the wilderness, literally leaving the hero to the wolves.
Rebel Ridge, in contrast, takes a last-minute turn that can almost be described as Pollyannaish, as the villainous cops suddenly decide to help save the heroes just as all seems lost. Small town Southern cops are too often presented as one-dimensional racist yokels in movies (for a complex portrait of a small town Southern cop, check out Carl Franklin’s 1992 masterpiece One False Move), and it’s appealing that the basic goodness of some of them is affirmed here. But this twist is not set up in a way that’s convincing. It leads to a last scene that is ambivalent at best, confusing at worst.
Green Room is as punk rock as the group at its center. It never flinches, gets in and out fast, and delivers its energy in one sustained burst. Rebel Ridge is more like a double album by a successful band given over to its own excesses. There are some great tracks for sure, but a lot of filler. Saulnier is at his best when he doesn’t pull any punches with his material, and when he picks a genre and sticks to it.
Rebel Ridge is streaming on Netflix.
