"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Rebel Ridge

REBEL RIDGE is the latest from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, who’s now five for five in my book. He did the gory art world satire MURDER PARTY (2007), then broke through with the revenge deconstruction BLUE RUIN (2013), followed by the punks vs. skinheads gem GREEN ROOM (2015) and the eerie Alaskan Gothic HOLD THE DARK (2018). Like that last one, REBEL RIDGE is a straight-to-Netflix movie, but it already seems to be more of a crowdpleaser (being their number one movie for a week) and I appreciate that I’ve been able to watch it twice already, even if I would’ve loved to see it in a theater.

I’d say this is in the tradition of what Saulnier has done before and a departure from it in about equal measure. On the one hand, it’s a supremely well-crafted movie of great tension and fierce intelligence, dancing between genre subversion and fulfillment, feeling less like what you expected than what you didn’t know you needed. On the other hand, this is the one Saulnier movie so far with a pretty traditional action hero type of protagonist, at least in the sense that he’s hyper-competent and keeps getting underestimated. Usually (with BLUE RUIN being the best example) Saulnier follows ordinary people who are in way over their heads, finding out this shit isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies and making a huge mess of pretty much every step of the process. But Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, The Underground Railroad) is much more in the vein of Jack Reacher – highly skilled former Marine bad motherfucker who wanders into a hornet’s nest of small town corruption while just trying to help out his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc, PROJECT POWER). Like Reacher he’s of simple means – he had to sell his car and ride a bike into town to pay the cash bail for Mike’s possession charge. But a police car rams him, officers Evan (David Denman, POWER RANGERS) and Steve (Emory Cohen, SWEETHEART) find the money and confiscate it as evidence, and he only has a few days to get Mike out before he’s transferred to a state prison, where he’ll be in danger because he was once a cooperating witness in a murder trial.

Terry does everything he can to fix the situation, including the ballsy but legal move of walking into the podunk Shelby Springs police station and trying to report the seizure as a robbery. That doesn’t exactly endear him to Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson, DEAD BANG), whose nature we get hints at by the early details that 1) he recently used civil forfeitures as “discretionary funds” to buy the fellas a margarita machine and 2) he whines about being underfunded even though he and the boys are the ones who bankrupted the town by being hit with a civil suit.

Similarly, we get some clues about what Terry’s all about by watching what he does. Right after well-meaning Officer Jessica Simmons (Zsane Jhe, also from The Underground Railroad) compliments his memory for his description of the suspects, he looks over at a white board with everybody’s shifts listed, and you better believe he retains that information. And instead of finding a hotel he sets up in the woods and cooks a fish he catches with his bare hands.

Saulnier has described this as FIRST BLOOD meets MICHAEL CLAYTON. That fits because though it has some high grade badass shit and classic action tropes (including a Hall of Fame worthy new variation on the Just How Badass Is He? scene) it’s really kind of a legal thriller, laying out very accurate systemic fuckery. Police really are allowed to take people’s money and property if they claim suspicion of drug trafficking – literal highway robbery. They really do profile Black people, demonize drug users and use their bigoted assumptions to justify their own lawlessness. Mike did the right thing in the eyes of the system by turning against a gang leader, then straightened his life out but is doomed by having some pot on him, something that’s not even a crime in much of the country and only ever was because of a long history of racist nonsense. It’s not an accident that the cops in this try to set up a climactic showdown at the titular location, implied to be a battleground of some historic significance to the Confederacy. Those echoes keep reverberating.

Weirdly, what this kind of reminds me of is a John Grisham movie. I guess it’s just because I watched THE CLIENT for my summer of ’94 retrospective. Terry happens to talk to sympathetic courthouse assistant Summer (AnnaSophia Robb, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY), who uses her knowledge to help him stand up to the powerful – though like little Brad Renfro he’s not trying to save the world, just protect himself. Like the Susan Sarandon character, Summer has a past addiction that cost her custody of a child. That makes her current status as a respectable and employed citizen feel precarious, and they’re happy to use that against her.

One unique aspect of the Terry Richmond character and the movie is that in the Seagalogical tradition “we’re not dealing with a student here, we’re dealing with a professor,” and yet he hasn’t killed a bunch of people for the American war machine. Not that he’s against it, as far as we know, it’s just that his role was teaching martial arts stateside. It’s so funny and natural when the cops underestimate him for not having been in combat that it didn’t occur to me until later that it also leaves his hands relatively clean as far as murdering people in Iraq. Good for him.

When push comes to shove, Terry takes the police on with “less lethal” methods as much as possible. He’s the Terminator shooting cops in the knee caps – he’ll snap a guy’s arm, he’ll make it hurt, but he won’t kill them. It’s a have/eat cake situation because it’s that EQUALIZER fantasy of the guy trained to calculate the exact simple movements to stop, disarm and incapacitate any motherfucker who comes at him, but with the realistic understanding that he can’t kill them because it would be an instant death sentence for a Black man. I know some people are disappointed that REBEL RIDGE doesn’t end in the type of massacre that they incorrectly believe FIRST BLOOD ends in, and that’s the risk the movie is taking in playing with our expectations this way. But I don’t know, man. Every time Terry takes away a gun and dismantles it that gets me way more hyped than a shootout would’ve.

It’s also a surprise coming from Saulnier, who has always excelled at gory and upsetting violence. I read that he wanted to make a movie his daughter could watch, but it’s so much a part of the story and character that it never felt to me like it was in any way sanitized or watered down. There are plenty of great violent movies for me to watch, not many where the baddest motherfucker humiliates cops by demonstrating de-escalation. Something they wouldn’t know about.

I know some people interested in the message of the movie have misgivings about (SPOILER) the way things wrap up, and I relate somewhat. It does feel a little like a STRANGE DAYS type cop out that his victory depends on two officers turning against the rest of the department, and the state police coming to back them up. But I mean, this is not really a “bad apples” situation – there are only two good apples! And we have no idea if he’s even going to succeed in exposing the bad ones. Meanwhile, the movie has painted such a detailed portrait of policing as a scam. Under the cover of reforming after civil rights violations, they’ve transformed into a business that steals money from citizens and uses it to fund an arsenal that they rent out to other departments to suppress protests of their own civil rights violations. We also see how they use Terry’s explanation of where his money came from as an excuse for another jurisdiction to harass a legitimate business he’s affiliated with. We see how a judge and courthouse clerk who don’t agree with what’s going on are complicit in it anyway. We see how much Summer is risking by doing the right thing, and how they try to use that to put her in her place. We even see how excited some random construction workers are at the possible opportunity to shoot a Black guy.

But REBEL RIDGE is such an entertaining movie I know I would love it even if it wasn’t saying as much. I haven’t talked to anyone who’s seen it without feeling like it was an instant star-making performance for Pierre, a last minute replacement when John Boyega left during filming. It’s an immediate “oh shit, who is this guy!?” type of role. Great character, great performance, scorching screen presence. I suspect we’ll be seeing him in all kinds of things right away, but still thinking of him as Terry Richmond for a while. This is another one of those movies that probly should and will stand alone but that I kinda wish would turn into an increasingly ridiculous series of sequels where he travels around to different towns and runs into more shit.

It’s a little more straight forward in its narrative and suspense building, but I suspect I’ll remember this in a similar category to David Mamet’s REDBELT and SPARTAN: smart, dialogue-heavy thrillers that are not technically action movies but the lead characters and the execution and context of their brief bursts of action are so potently badass that I love them as much as I would an actual action movie. Definitely one of my favorites this year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 19th, 2024 at 10:13 am and is filed under Reviews, Action, Thriller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

45 Responses to “Rebel Ridge”

  1. Cannot ever praise the “Just How Badass Is He?” scene in this. I actually pumped my fist like my favorite team scored the goddamned winning touchdown.

    Glad this movie is bringing a light to civil asset forfeiture. But, as Vern mentioned, in regards to Mike, this is instructive as far as people who snitch to the cops. I am against snitching, not necessarily for a moral code, but because it is a transaction pushed by officials, lawyers and federal officers that entirely leaves the snitch under-protected. Beyond Witness Protection, there are a million ways snitches get exposed, particularly if re-arrested. People who snitch frequently aren’t aware they’re signing a death sentence, and it’s all under the guise of the government “helping” that person.

  2. Cannot OVERpraise, I meant. Sorry!

    Also, Aaron Pierre will always be Midsize Sedan to me.

  3. I generally avoid streaming-only movies on general principle but I might have to make an exception for this one. I’ve been a Saulnier fan since he was just the guy who made MURDER PARTY. I never got around to HOLD THE DARK–a movie I’ve been warned on penalty of death by boredom to never, ever watch–but I’m glad he seems to have turned back from the slow-burn-to-nowhere path that so many of his genre peers have gotten lost on, never to return.

  4. Yeah, this is an all-timer, and with apologies to Miller and Villeneuve, definitely the best new movie I’ve seen this year; Would be very pleasantly surprised if anything ends up topping it.
    The script on this thing is a finely-tuned precision engine – two hours and something and it kept me totally engaged for its entirety. I knew I was going to love it as soon as I realized the first scene is bookended with Iron Maiden and SOD; what an incredible way to signal a tone change.

    (SPOILERS, slight): I wasn’t too down on the ending. It does seem a little too hopeful to feel true, but it also feels… right that the righteousness of Terry’s actions – and his steadfast insistence on de-escalating things and avoiding conflict – would shame the less horrible of the policepeople into breaking ranks, especially when Sandy goes overboard later on; You can almost see them thinking “hey, I could be next”. And I likedthe identity of the informant, that was a cute subversion of expectations.

  5. I thought this was a blast! I mentioned previously that I had no idea this movie existed until Vern’s out of office note referenced a new one from Saulnier, then watched the trailer and immediately watched the movie that night. I’m probably in the minority here but I was glad this movie was on streaming, even if streaming movies are diluting the overall quality of Cinema in the way everyone correctly notes- I saw Beetlejuicebeetlejuice in the theater and there were literally 40 minutes of commercials AFTER the advertised starting time! Sitting among the public and the communal filmatic experience is fun on special occasions but anymore, when I have a home projector that feels every bit as cinematic as a real silver screen, I do not feel much if any motivation to see movies in a theater and sit through 40 minutes of marketing while trying to fart silently into seat cushions.

    I am not trying to be a hater and I have nothing against the guy but I can’t imagine having enjoyed this as much with Boyega in the lead. Aaron Pierre was phenomenal in the understated way he conveyed that mounting sense of “I devoted my life to an institution and honor, and I don’t want to dishonor that by going rogue but all these dishonorable motherfuckers are giving me no good options.” This almost felt like a Batman story to me in ways, but the comparison to Redbelt is far more apt. And the “Just how badass is he?” scene is one for the record books just for the delivery of “…Oh.” Even surpasses the exact same reaction in John Wick for my tastes.

    I also loved how the badass moments were occasionally underscored by Pierre’s casual observations- “I put a little too much sauce on that?”

    (Maybe vague spoilers about the ending?)
    .
    .
    The ending seemed abrupt and somewhat idealistic as noted in the review, a bit jarring compared to the rest of the movie, but also true to the character that he would want to have a victory that could exist within the system. The violence wasn’t the solution, it was just a means toward getting to the systemic vindication that would ultimately address this corrupt little fiefdom. It fits with his previous comments on “I don’t care about this town and fixing it’s problems, I just want to help the people I do care about who are being hurt by it” and that went from the cousin to the blonde courthouse lady. I didn’t expect Parks and Rec to have that kind of character arc but it was at least somewhat believably done.

    I have been waiting for this review to do a rewatch so I’m eager to see what stands out on a second viewing. But this one is one of my favorites from recent memory.

  6. I guess I can relate to Saulnier’s daughter then. I thought Blue Ruin was brilliantly directed but watched most of it through my fingers. I’m fine with your Hellraisers and your Braindeads but that tone of sudden, realistic and upsetting violence was too much for me. Haven’t tried Green Room although the story sounds like it’s my kind of thing. So I was worried going into this one and very relieved that now there’s a Saulnier I can enjoy.

  7. I might need to watch this one again, as I apparently didn’t love it as much as everyone else. It’s my fault; the trailer promised me a “we gotta kill all these redneck cops” movie and I got a 2 hour and 11 minute “we gotta stop this small-town police corruption” movie. But yeah, the action (what there was of it) was solid and Pierre is a very good lead. (And Don Johnson is a fucking AWESOME villain. Although they do totally different things, he and Hugh Grant are both having a real blast with late-career turns toward villainy, doing some of their best work ever in the process.)

  8. Aaron Pierre for Bond, anyone?

  9. Eh. It was okay. Pierre was very good. He reminded me of Tiny Lister. He played the character like he could be Deebo’s benevolent little brother.

    There were a lot of solid elements. Good supporting cast, well-paced tension-building, etc. Unfortunately, knowing ahead of time nobody died took a lot of the joy out of it for me. Maybe you guys are more well adjusted than me and you can make the mature choice to enjoy non-lethal justice, but I’m a simple creature. I got needs. I watch a movie like this to see assholes pay. Violently. Spectacularly. Immediately. Here, one rando gets a broken arm that’ll probably trouble him when it rains in the years ahead, and some others get some bumps and bruises. That one guy is probably looking at an orbital fracture. The skirmishes (I can’t call them fights) are skillfully choreographed and presented, but it’s just not enough. My bloodlust remains unquenched.

    Maybe if I felt like these shitheads were totally fucked and humiliated, I could give it a pass. But at the end it’s all for some fuckin’ dashcam footage? Great. So maybe one or two of them get 18 months in minimum security. More likely they’ll just quietly resign and get hired by some other shithole town that doesn’t mind bankrupting itself as long as minorities get put in their place. It’s just not satisfying. It’s not like that ending is going for realism anyway. The state police rides in like the calvary and gives an escort to a black guy in a stolen police car? Yeah right. If they’re gonna expect me to swallow that, they might as well have gone all the way and exploded a few heads.

    And what was this great “How badass is he?” scene? The part where she’s like “I think he’s on Wikipedia”? I was expecting something special and then it was just over.

    Maybe I let you guys build it up too much. It was decent but unexceptional. A good story but not exactly an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride.

    But Pierre was good. I look forward to maybe seeing him in a real action movie someday.

  10. Mr. Majestyk, I must thank you for the Deebo reference because this will be all I see when I rewatch it. I think the alternate universe version of this movie where it actually stars Lister would be the one you wanted to see with exploding heads. I also kinda wanna see that but I liked this version we got.

    It is kinda strange that this is the same guy who did Murder Party and Green Room, and there is not more disturbing violence than an elbow snap. I was also waiting for more graphic violence. But I guess my tastes these days are less Brawl in Cell Block 99ish kicking heads down toilets and more Blue Ruinish Buzz McAllister mall ninja Whistler eccentricity, so I kinda liked this subdued slow burn take on a very well worn righteous vendetta trope story. And the “JHBAIH?” scene is more of the same- it’s a comedic underselling of her reading of the wikipedia page against the sheriff’s dawning “oh shit” realization of the scope of his fuck up all shown through Johnson’s stress. It hits all the beats in a way that reminded me of Elmore Leonard. And the little things like the Chinese restaurant owner getting pressed and the blonde lady laying out their leverage against her all hit those same beats for me in just enough- but not too sappy- detail to be satisfying.

    I basically had to rationalize the ending as “this is the best ending this protagonist could hope for, for himself” because while it’s not satisfying like exploding neo Confederate heads, that wouldn’t be any more of a satisfying ending for the character arc, and seeing him go that feral would almost feel like a betrayal of all the ways they reinforced that this guy isn’t trying to kill anyone just trying to stop dumb motherfuckers from fucking with him so he can get on with the business of getting through life. I very much relate to that.

  11. Great review, great movie. Aaron Pierre is indeed a star and they got lucky Boyega is such an irresponsible flake, he wouldn’t have been half as good.

  12. I’m in the same boat as Majestyk. But to judge the movie it is, not the one I want it to be, I have to say it’s good. It’s probably more interesting the way it is than the one I want it to be would be. It just didn’t quite scratch my itch.

    But Pierre was very good. There was a moment when he was facing off with Johnson in the parking lot that he lowered his head, made intense eye contact, and had this demonic grin on his face where I thought, “Jesus, I hope no one ever looks at me like that.”

  13. I was in from the first scene – not enough movies have badass cyclists as protagonists and this is a new genre I want to see more of. I like that he pedalled what I think is a gravel track bike at about 70km an hour to fist-bump his cousin through a bus window – this is our first sign that the cops should not be fucking with this dude. That this is then followed by the best ‘Just how badass is this guy?’ scene in recent memory was fantastic, but those of us who cycle, own gravel track bikes and have tried to cycle alongside vehicles moving at speed already knew. Fantastic review Vern – hope you had a good break, but it’s great to have you back with a banger.

  14. Every single person I’ve talked to about the movie has immediately brought up “I think he’s on the Wikipedia page.” The comical suspense of her having to restart the router while her dumbass superior is out there stepping in it and we’re waiting to see what she’s gonna learn makes it all the sweeter.

  15. I really enjoyed myself watching this, and I was kind of surprised when I became aware of the hatred online. I can just about make out what Maggie and Vince are shouting from their boat way out there at sea. But from where I’m sitting here on dry land, this looks like good, solid entertainment.

  16. I agree with Maggie that the movie the way it is is probably more interesting than the movie the way I want it, but I’d enjoy it a lot more the way I want it. I can see how the deescalation theme is strong but the villains pissed me off too much for too long for me to enjoy seeing them get away with just some scrapes and a little jail time. I’ll grant the movie that: It did a good job of getting me invested. Maybe too good, considering how little payoff there was.

    I will have to concede that there’s something in the Wikipedia scene that went right over my head. I mean, lots of people are on Wikipedia. Just being on Wikipedia doesn’t automatically make you a legendary badass. She didn’t even read what it said about him on there. It could have said he was the worst martial arts instructor in the history of the Marine Corps. It could specifically say he had an eating contest with a billy goat one time and the billy goat won by a mile. We just don’t know.

  17. No points for injecting a little realism and non-violence into a genre where they have been decapitating people for jaywalking lately?

  18. I said that it was interesting. But interesting is the concession prize I give out when a movie’s got good elements but I don’t think it actually works. It’s the participation trophy. Good hustle out there, kid. You’ll get ‘em next time.

    I also don’t consider this movie any more realistic than any more violent vigilante movie. Our hero would be in jail for the rest of his life or dead within the first 15 minutes if they were actually going for realism. They gave him way too many passes that real cops wouldn’t. We’re still deep in fantasyland here, just without the cathartic parts that make suspension of disbelief worth it.

    For that matter, I don’t automatically consider realism a positive quality. Realism is often the coward’s way out of having an imagination. I don’t think it has much place in cinema in general, and action cinema in particular.

  19. I’ve overstating as usual. It’s fine. I just didn’t love it.

  20. I’ve overstating as usual. It’s fine. I just didn’t love it.

  21. I think I liked this more than Majestyk, but I’m still kinda with him here. The movie has completely flown off into fantasyland by the final act, only nonlethally Batman-ing a bunch of evil cops isn’t a very satisfying or interesting fantasy to me. I guess I can appreciate what Saulnier is trying to say/do morally, here, but I’m also not sure that aspirational role model behavior is really what I’m looking for when we’re in action/thriller/crime fiction territory.

    There’s still a lot to like here, I’m pro the movie in general, but it’s very pat and crowd-pleasing in ways that Saulnier avoided to much greater effect (for me, anyway) in BLUE RUIN and GREEN ROOM.

  22. Well, I didn’t expect to end the week stuck on a boat with Majestyk, but here we are. It’s fine. The tension and plot escalation are very well done, Pierre is a star, and Johnson really is having a great late career, but if the intention here wasn’t so very clear I’d say it failed to stick the landing. Which is how I felt about GREEN ROOM.

    But I think the intention is clear and we are getting the movie Saulnier set out to make. I can respect that and acknowledge that it’s very well done, but that don’t mean I have to like it as much as, say, THE BEEKEEPER. If Statham walks off a movie sometime, I’ll be glad if they give Pierre a call to cover for him.

  23. Upon a rewatch, I feel like a big factor in my appreciation for this movie is- I don’t really *like* violence, especially graphic gun violence, in movies. It’s not appealing or cathartic to me, really at all, these days. I am very much on the normie movie spectrum compared to many of you guys- I LOVE reading about your love for ultra violent shit like The Raid or John Wick, I wouldn’t frequent this site if I didn’t enjoy hearing about it and the incredibly thoughtful analysis, but I don’t enjoy watching those movies all that much. Gone soft in my dad era, for sure- I generally turn off any movie that uses “I’m sad about my dead kid” as character development as soon as they trot it out- but watching Keanu pistol whip randos before putting two in their skull gets more of a yuck from me than a fist pump, no matter how deserving those cardboard cutout eastern European gangsters might seem on paper. Same with intentionally cartoon gore violence like Terrifier- I see what they are doing, I understand the audience for it, but I respectfully decline. But if that’s your thing, go ham! I’m not gonna judge. Just please don’t buy me a ticket, I won’t use it.

    The appeal of this movie for me is that restraint. You keep waiting for it to turn into the Equalizer, and it doesn’t. Instead, the protagonist lives up to the ideals that are betrayed at every turn by the corrupt cops that are sworn to uphold them, and beats them at their own game. He remains the adult in the room, putting adversaries into a headlock until they give up struggling and stop playing badass. THAT’S a real badass, imo. And Saulnier is actually pretty consistent in those ideals- he’s not interested in glamorizing gun violence in his movies, or the concept of violent revenge in general. But still gives us a taste of that tension in wanting it. I enjoy the line he walks that Vern describes, between subversion and fulfillment, and it’s perfectly done here, for my tastes.

    I salute you guys on the speedboat to Busan and sometimes wish I wasn’t prone to this seasickness so I could enjoy the rough waves a bit more than I do, because it always looks like you’re having fun out there, but I think we are all at the point in life of accepting that it’s ok to skip the meals that give you heartburn and just consume what you find satisfying. Pass me the ranch, please.

  24. I wouldn’t necessarily say “Rebel Ridge” proved to be a corrective for me. But yeah, I can understand the desire to move away from all the hardcore violence (unless it’s really, really, really imaginative). I like the “John Wick” movies, but I’m generally bored an hour in, and I wish that sort of choreographed discipline was shown towards a big musical instead.

    Thing is, we used to believe in the idea of One Man Taking On The System. But if Aaron Pierre started taking heads in Rebel Ridge and dealing out bloody violence, it would have become guns versus guns, and we’ve always known who has the most guns. We don’t have the cultural optimism to believe anymore that someone like him can heroically kill a couple of cops and somehow not be punished — we know full well in 2024 to not play with boys in blue, especially as a minority. You need to find a new formula for that sort of movie, and a guy who learns about civic law and deals in de-escalation techniques while dismantling a crooked cop operation is a step in the right direction.

    I think, if I were ever in an action movie situation where I get some sudden Big Boy Adrenaline and kill a “bad guy”, I would be so deeply affected and traumatized about ending a life by my own hand to really function. Maybe others are different — maybe the videogame generation (of which I was not a part) finds it easier to unload a clip into someone, pretend he’s faceless. But I would be too deeply affected by the life I ended. Death should matter to characters. I like “Commando”, but do you really think death matters to John Matrix?

    That being said, ideally my kind of movie has an absurd third act twist where the cops all end up murdering each other while Aaron Pierre gets away clean.

  25. What you’re saying is true…in life. But life is life and movies are movies. If movies ever had to be like life, I think I’d probably stop watching movies. What would be the point?

  26. To invoke the warrior poet-

    What does it take to change the essence of Don Johnson?

  27. Given the pre release hype, and the fact that I’ve enjoyed the other Saulnier films I’ve seen, I’m afraid I found this a very underwhelming film.

    I liked the start and that it hit the ground running. It sets up a promising situation but then didn’t really go anywhere interesting with it. The whole police corruption plot they were uncovering seemed both overly contrived and a bit lacking given the mayhem it unleashed. The film was quite silly at times and not in an entertaining way.

    This did share common ground with both Blue Ruin and Green Room in that they all have 2 sides against each other with revenge escalating and getting out of hand. However I felt those 2 had an edge and tension about them that this one lacked. Not unwatchable, just a bit disappointing.

  28. Literally it’s “what is MCMAP, won’t do him much good here, who gives a shit” and then “oh wait, no, it’s a heavy duty martial arts system and this guy is so important to it that his photo is on the fucking Wikipedia page.” But the way it feels is like if they looked up “bad motherfucker” in the dictionary and there was a picture of him next to it.

  29. I get the concept. I guess I just wasn’t as amazed by it as everyone else. Maybe because I was waiting for it. I expected that moment to be the prelude to a big Trautman-esque monologue or something but then it just ended and I thought I missed something.

  30. Not currently being subscribed to Netflix I haven’t seen this yet, but is Terry Richmond not having “killed a bunch of people for the American war machine” truly a unique element? Tommy Lee Jones’ L.T. Bonham in THE HUNTED (a very Seagal-esque character, as noted in Vern’s review) was an instructor who never joined the military, let alone served in combat. I’m probably just indulging in prescriptivism with regard to “unique” meaning something one-of-a-kind, but while I’m at it, saying that this is “not really a ‘bad apples’ situation” illustrates how the meaning of that term has shifted over time from the original sense of “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch”, which seems especially common in the context of police misconduct.

  31. Just finished this tonight. I’m going to bat that the ending was great and that Terry is even more badass for not killing anyone while still defeating them all. It would have been easier if he had just killed them vs taking each of them out with the intention of risking his life even more to make sure he doesn’t kill anyone. I love bloody mayhem in my revenge action movies as much as anyone but this case it adds to the character and the story and doesn’t take anything away from it. It played on our expectations and showed us a differ type of hero. He’s not John Matrix as mentioned before but he’s not Batman either. Because Batman typically has the upper hand even if he’s outnumbered. He has billions of dollars, tech, a car, a plane. This guy had training, a bicycle, and his brain.
    This did feel very Elmore Leonardesque.
    I love and find fascinating that the guy who made Murder Party, Blue Ruin, and Green Room wanted to make a movie that his daughter could see so he wrote an action/revenge movie importantly but also very specifically about civil forfeiture.
    The cast was great. The moment after Terry says “Maybe you’ll see me coming” and right before he hangs up and says “I put too much sauce on that” he pauses and looks off in a way that seemed to
    subtlety show that he was catching himself in a state of who he once was and a part of who he is but doesn’t want to be and snapped out of it. Great
    acting. Love it.

  32. My one complaint..where was Macon Blair??
    Could he not have played the circuit clerk or even one of the cops??

  33. I can’t disagree with anything you guys are saying, but I only agree in theory. In practice, I did not get the rush a good piece of badass cinema is supposed to deliver.

  34. Maybe they can make the more-violent sequel about CRIMINAL asset forfeiture, which is when they arrest someone and seize property alleged to have been obtained through illicit means. That’s why police departments occasionally have raffles and giveaways with jet skis and motor homes. Surely there’s some criminal who is gonna want his cufflinks or gold chanclas back.

  35. I knew what MCMAP was, so that scene was an immensely enjoyable slow burn. I also liked the combat was realistic, unlike a Seagal or Reacher, though it took a moment to adjust my expectations

  36. I didn’t expect to like this, but Goddamn I did! Like Majestyk, I found it “Action-Lite” and I guess I’ve been Rambo-ed, Wick-ed and Equalizer-ed enough to be primed to expect my hero to take out motherfuckers with extreme “gut him like a swine and rip his heart out of his rib cage” prejudice, but once I settled into the movie’s template of stranger walks into (or cycled) town mired in evil and corruption and proceeds to clean it up with a combo of detective work and some fists and realized they were going more for Reacher (book version) than Rambo, I dug it. And I like that Saulnier films it like a horror/survival thriller with that thrumming industrial score and the lurking and stalking menace of police cars on lonely country roads effectively replacing Jason Voorhees and The Hitcher.

    Pierre has the chops and presence of a young Denzel and the fluid grace of Snipes in the action scenes and Don Johnson is such an effective bad guy these days, it’s hard to think he was a bona fide heartthrob once upon a time, making pastel shades, sockless shoes and partial stubbles a fashion statement.

    I abhor the use of that rather snotty term “Thinking Person’s Action Movie” but I have to agree, this is more Redbelt than Rambo, so if you’re expecting our hero to break out the Berserker Mode 15 mins in and the guns and ammo 5 mins after, look elsewhere. Weird as the comparison maybe, but REBEL RIDGE for me is spiritual cousin to the magnificent RUROUNI KENSHIN movies, both featuring a bad ass so adept at dealing out death he makes a conscious decision not to, in the process being a different kind of Awesome with a fearsome repository of techniques to incapacitate without killing.

  37. Hopefully we will see a The Substance review this week?

    Just watched it and it is maybe my favorite movie of 2024.

    Julia Ducournau and Brandon Cronenberg must have watched this and thought “Well….shit”.

  38. Fingers crossed that it comes in a package with reviews of REJUVENATRIX and THE WASP WOMAN.

  39. The Substance= An aging star makes a Faustian pact to regain her youth, with disastrous results.
    Am looking forward to watching it too, I just hope people don’t forget Robert Zemeckis got here first with fewer splattering body parts

  40. BLUE RUIN, GREEN ROOM, and now BLACK REACHER (sorry, I’m sorry). Aaron Pierre is great in this. I like John Boyega, but his smaller frame and more youthful appearance (despite being older!) would make this a different movie. Here, Pierre’s Terry Richmond is more off-road SUV than mid-sized sedan, an unstoppable force coming up against an immovable object. He’s fantastic showing this highly trained but untested badass struggling to restrain himself against a corrupt system. Like Swayze, he’s nice until it’s time not to be nice.

    I thought this was tense but not unbearably so, and thrilling but with a deliberate pacing, giving ample time to screw-turning. Definitely one of my favorite movies so far this year.

    I assume the role Steve Zissis played was written for Macon Blair, but maybe the reshoots scuttled this, and/or he was busy with TOXIC AVENGER. He does get a producer credit.

  41. So much better and more interesting than I would have thought. The trailer made it look like Saulnier sold out and just made a typical flick, but nope it’s a Saulnier joint through and through. He bridges the gap between keeping the story realistic and doing twists on well worn and tired formulas. Wanting this to be more typical to me is like wishing Schindlet ends up going Rambo on the bad guys…what’s the point. There’zz 30 major releases like that a year, go watch those, while this guy makes his comment on formula tropes happen every few years. I love seeing the lead know he’s fighting a system and has basically learned it’s gonna be rigged against him so tries to work around things, and frankly it was kind of nice seeing a movie that shows a guy can stand up, use defensive tactics, and not just be a bloodthirsty maniac (especially nice to see in a movie where the bad guys are cops).

    Boyega is fine I don’t have a huge opinion on him either way, but THIS guy was fucking fantastic. Never seen him before and I like that, I really didn’t know where he was leaning. I also never cared for Don Johnson but this later stage of his career is nothing but bangers. He shouldn’t be playing leads, this shit is his calling.

    Saulnier movies have lots of action in them, but I don’t think of them as “action movies”. This has the most out of his stuff but it’s not really the drive of them. To me his stuff is more like, I dunno…Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia has action in it, but it’s more of a drama, really. Or like Rolling Thunder. The actual violence/action isn’t the point of it all. I think he’s working along those lines.

    deepfriednoir…if you thought Blur Ruin was a lot, then go in hardcore ready for Green Room which is way more violent and nasty. I never thought Blue Ruin was particuarily bad in that regard, but damn even I thought Green Room really went for it.

  42. Grabbing the gun before the sheriff can raise it, shown in the first still, and the coolly delivered line “let’s not do that” IS one of my favorite moments from any movie this year. Sometimes a single snapshot of a film is so completely perfect the entire work is elevated. This is an example.

    Otherwise it’s good, maybe very good—though I admit I lost a bit of interest as the complexities of the plot worked their way out, and isn’t “Rebel Ridge” itself barely even in it?

    But that one disarming moment—yeah, baby. Perfection.

  43. Oh, and also, “Number of the Beast” is a damn good needle drop, even if it is over the opening credits. Might be a “Best Of” contender as well.

  44. Put me in the “fucking loved it” camp.

    On the ending: Officer Sims turn made sense to me. She has always been on desk duty, making it easier to ignore her fellow officers’ behavior. It’s a lot different when you see them talking about shooting an unarmed man, drugging an innocent woman, and then you see your Chief shoot a fellow officer (and remember that it was her choice to try and stop Terry that causes the showdown). At that point things have escalated so much that there is no clean outcome. Even if they shot Terry before the car chase this was going to lead to more outside investigations. And even for the officers who have previously roughed up suspects or stolen, things are now escalating to full on murder. I don’t think they suddenly became moral or decent as much as self-preservation took priority over protecting the Chief and the dept as a whole.

    I also loved Terry’s less-lethal tactics. I love violent action movies and shoot’em ups, but as I said about The Fall Guy, I really appreciate having a hero who DOESN’T shoot everyone in their way. And the moral and legal layers of this story make it the right choice. I often think about how I would make an action movie that actually aligns with my beliefs and concerns, instead of having to turn off everything I think about the real world and just accepting a fictional world where might makes right and guns solve all problems. This is like the best possible version of that. I get it, not everyone is down for a non-lethal socially conscious thriller. But you have a million other movies that can deliver enjoyably empty violence and cartoonishly bad guys getting gorily dispatched. Heck, one of my movie ideas started based on how awesome it would be to see a bunch of Klansman get absolutely destroyed (with all the exploding heads a Majestyk could ask for!). I’m just excited when someone tries something different.

    I have been a fan of director Jeremy Saulnier since I saw and loved Blue Ruin. I liked Green Room, if a little less than other people. I liked Hold the Dark more than most people seemed to. That was definitely his most challenging movie, and I can see how it might frustrate or bore others. With Rebel Ridge I feel like he has delivered a crowd pleaser without selling out or dumbing down his style at all.

    I am not a fan of a lot (most?) of Netflix’s creative/business decisions, but I am really glad they are giving Saulnier the opportunity to make movies like this. If this was direct-to-video it would have a lower budget and shorter shooting schedule. Saulnier has proved he can work with that, but it wouldn’t hit the same. It feels like it is perfectly scaled as is. If it was going to be a big theatrical release, the studio would probably want it to be bigger and more bombastic and it would lose the grounded, thoughtful qualities Saulnier brings. That would probably also mean a bigger budget, meaning the studio would want a bigger star, meaning no Aaron Pierre.

    Oh shit, how have I not mentioned Aaron Pierre yet? This better be a breakout role for him because he KILLS it. On a purely physical level, he’s diesel as hell but still mobile and flexible enough to do all the CQC. He’s so handsome it feels almost uncanny valley. And most importantly he acts the hell out of this. Simmering rage, unleashed rage, quiet pain, burning indignity, the wonderful moments where he is calculated and confident enacting some threats or takedowns. And he cracks some jokes! Not Marvel-style sarcastic quips during fights, not 80s action one-liners after he beats someone. Just in the quiet little conversations or moments where you see that he’s probably a pretty funny guy when he is not stuck in a Sisyphean struggle against injustice.

    There is a Mr. Show sketch where a gunman has held a man hostage and forced him to be Santa Claus for 500 years. “You just keep bein’ Santa, see? And never die, see?”
    I don’t have a gun, but… “You just keep bein’ Jeremy Saulnier, see? And never die, see?” or maybe its Netlifx I need to threaten, “You just keep making Saulnier movies, see?”
    Let him keep making unique, compelling films that aren’t tied to franchises or tentpole expectations. I don’t want a Mavel movie where we say “oh you can see some of Saulnier’s style come through here and there.” NO. I want pure, uncut Saulnier baby!

  45. “I feel like he has delivered a crowd pleaser without selling out or dumbing down his style at all.” Well put. And you make really good points about how this could’ve suffered in either a DTV or theatrical production. Hopefully the popularity of this one helps get whatever else he has get made quickly, though who knows with this business model.

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