Rebel Ridge
Rebel Ridge
It is unfortunate that Netflix did not release the ‘Rebel Ridge’ theatrically because it puts the rest of the films running on the big screen right now to shame. Surely, there is no better way to finish off the summer movie season than with a cracking mainstream action blockbuster that is as enthralling as it is politically relevant. The writer-director of the film, Jeremy Saulnier, is somewhat of a maverick in that regard. The film he made almost a decade ago, ‘The Green Room’, is in that sense an interesting work due to the prescience it displayed in regards to white nationalism in America dominated by Trump. In it, a horrifyingly violence-laden, punk-rock styled cage-fight drama, the violence looked both baffling in its prophetic nature and – in the literal disemboweling of neo-Nazi scum – was also satisfaction. And now you have made one unsanctioned one-man-army revenge movie-think Zero Dark Thirty gone wrong, where evil turned out to be the ‘good’ ex-cops gone rogue, doing what rogue cops always do, only this time using actual law to do so. It is pretty much First Blood for the ACAB generation.
Saulnier increases the tension by an order of magnitude. No sooner have we made the acquaintance of Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) sucking the Iron Maiden out in a back road, than the cruiser pursuing him ensures that his seat is ejected pitch-wise. This first sequence very successfully plays the audience’s understanding, be it first or second hand, of how such objects as flashing lights are a threat to the lives of Americans of color. In a rehearsed choreography of what he will be legally allowed to do fully defers any action that just might provoke the officers who are on the brink of inventing a charges of evading arrest against a very cute tresshis. Yet here is an outrage that he cannot suppress completely, no matter how much he tries. When the two cops take the $36,000 an indignant Terry had in his bag claiming that it was all a part of some racially biased drug scheme gone wrong: ‘bust Terry for conspiracy!’. “This can’t be legal,” he says, shaking his head with disbelief. Unfortunately, however, in too much of America, it is.
The tension and stakes only escalate from this point in the narrative. The money was what turned out not to be a salary, but bail. For misdemeanor possession, Terry’s cousin is facing a turn in state prison – an event that might endanger the younger man’s life since he has already spoke up in a gang murder case. Then Terry has to go get the money back, and as usual, the police chief of Shelby Springs, Alabama is off the mark. One such subversion is the casting of one-time TV narc Don Johnson as the cowboy lawman. The character that makes all the associations to Miami Vice aside, it’s a brilliant view of a villain, transporter cop – small-town dictator who cannot fathom an existence without being in charge.
Is it too official to explain that Terry is not an average citizen? And that the men in uniforms made the mistake of taking a lioness for a sheep? Here it comes latest initiative by Saulnier. It pits Odette and Johnson soli-de-wel towards the end of the movie sequel talking about in the precinct parking lot while also switching to the images of the policemen inside every bit conscious of what that grinning hardass Johnson learns about a bit too late in the begining from the outside light. Pierre, who last year’s Brother endowed with a burrowing simmering heat, quite steals the show here with a real star turn. Above all, his unnerving poise appears to be visceral moral outrage. And when the moment comes when it is time to let his inner Rambo out, Pierre’s movement is smoothly elegant and physically gentle but deadly accurate for which there are no weapons. This performance redeems a lovely cliche – almost fully peaceful action hero who is doing everything to the outreach of extreme range to which it is possible action and armed combat.
Of course, Terry is not only up against the corrupt police of one city. He is up against the entirety of polity. Or in Terry’s case, the entirety of the polity is an insidious web of middlemen, where grudging civil servants who probably want to avoid the firing line meet with low-level gangsters on payroll and even bought-off judges. Rebel Ridge gets into legal issues concerning civil property, in particular – the heinous legal practice, allowing the police to appropriate private property without even bothering to arrest anyone for a crime. A horrifying detail, the property becomes the defendant in a case and what is worse, the property cannot exercise civil rights.) Most of these little details help shape the film’s political consciousness that moderate action films do not have a majority of the time, it is like growing populism and defeating the establishment tool of spread-eagle structures of Ronald Reagan, demolishing inquisition, spreading action.
It is set in a “there-is-no-there-there” America style of pacification. It has observed a country that has not fully owned its evil deeds, allowing degradation to the higher lungs at best aid to over reformism and find ways around the boundaries set on the authorities. The exchanges aren’t just logical and anglo-sounding – it is cutting banter exchanging between characters and proceeding to escalating combatants. But it’s not only real, it’s realistic. The following weapon was used to assemble the syntax of a language with a police officer’s id. A number of sequences, such as the film’s ‘go for broke’ action packed climax will focus on systems that the bad guys have been trained to defeat their automatic in car cameras. What remains unvarnished in Rebel Ridge is the persistence of out of check, unrivaled, every law and its enforcers in the nation.
There are some faults in the conventional aspects of the film. There’s a rookie lawyer, who keeps the case alive, and who is Terry’s only friend in the war against the corrupted powers; a subplot that’s straight from a lost Grisham’s book. In her defense, AnnaSophia Robb is enjoyable, however she’s purely secondary and does not have any interesting features. Or James Cromwell that comes in to tie up the loose ends of the conspiracy and explain everything to the audience for the umpteenth time in the last three minutes. These are clichés from fictional works. However, they are well incorporated into the smart, pointed challenge to formulaic tropes that is Rebel Ridge. It’s a subversive popcorn.
As is the case with most of Saulnier’s thrillers including the blackly comic Blue Ruin and the depressed Hold the Dark, this is once more an escalation analysis, slowly raising a quarrel between the two sides to a boiling point. But it’s also about this very process of escalation as such – in other words, how the police and the military move in to a potentially explosive situation, whether they try to cool it down or engage in brute force toward its resolution. Rebel Ridge delivers the goods when the time comes: the finale is a screeching melee of gunfire, and crosses flying everywhere, and crossroads being broken; and through all that – all who cares – order is restored. Rather, it is in such pent fury at a developed climax that the true strength of the film is contained – in those contests over which one of the characters exclaims such dismissively ‘Pissing contests’ in our vernacular – the threats and physical intimidation and other forms of negotiations that occur before the actual shooting begins. The quiet before the hurricane – that is the action in a Jeremy Saulnier film.
Conclusion
Scary honkers is probably the last film anyone would’ve expected from Jeremy Saulnier, a genre he manages to master and makes it perhaps his most entertaining one yet. It features an out-of-towner downplayed by the fabulously surging Aaron Pierre who gets embroiled into some cops’ civil forfeit scheme gone awry who turns out to be just embellishment. The face-off that ensues is reminiscent of issues tackled in First Blood which was Sylvester Stallone’s first role as John Rambo but upgraded for today’s cinema, that is all brawl thrill that also carries political undertones about America. So much for performers’ acting skills and beautiful angle shots – Saulnier rips these sectors on double standards where the police abuse their public – and delivers the year’s most nail-biting stand-offs. That is what modern blockbusters have to be: intelligent, interesting, and about something.
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- Genre: Action, Crime, Featured, Popular Movies, Thriller, Top Rated Movies
- Country: United States
- Director: Jeremy Saulnier
- Cast: Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Emory Cohen, David Denman, Oscar Gale, Steve Zissis, Daniel Chung, Dana Lee, C.J. LeBlanc, Zsané Jhé, Reid Williams, Matthew Rimmer, Brannon Cross, Victor Eli Hugo, James Cromwell, Chelsea Bryan, Al Vicente, Terence Rosemore, Leslie Nipkow, Rhonda Johnson Dents
