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.
September 19th, 2024 at 10:41 am
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.