Movie Review : Rebel Ridge (2024)

There's a long and celebrated American tradition of movies where two characters fight over a giant bag of money. The money is never really just money. It symbolizes a better life, a change of social status and sometimes it's just access to a pipe dream that isn't meant to be lived out. Jeremy Saulnier’s new movie Rebel Ridge is one of these movies. It doesn't mean to be cynical (at least not as much as it ends up being), yet it’s a bleak outlook on our broken social system. But it's also pretty damn entertaining.

Rebel Ridge tells the story of ex-US Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is on his way to bail his cousin out of a strange, nonsensical arrest when he gets hit by a cop car and sensibly robbed of the 36 000$ he was transporting under the legal loophole of "legal asset forfeiture" or something like that. When he attempts to report the crime, he is confronted by villainous police chief Sandy Burnne (the always awesome Don Johnson) and a ridiculously sneaky and violent standoff ensues.

Frontier Romance and Conflict Resolution

I'm not gonna bust your balls about how Rebel Ridge perfectly illustrate the moral and political failures of capitalism because I don't believe it does that. It's not a social movie. It's a frontier fantasy about the breakdown and reinvention of social order amidst the confrontation of two American institutions: the police and the army. The most romantic of the two is always going to be the latter since it’s unbothered with policing the people from its own country. It makes for a predictable, but satisfying movie.

What happens between Terry and Chief Burnne is the failure of conflict resolution. As you'll figure out as the movie goes along, none of them can make any compromise, moral or financial. That inability leads them into a memorable battle of egos where Burnne shows off his tactical skills and where Terry shows off his on-field badassery. Lots of the movie though focuses on two men looking at one another in the eyes and telling the other he's not willing to back down on his demands and that’ll he's ready to duke it out.

So yeah, this is closer to a contemporary Western than it is of, let’s say the Dickensianism of The Wire. I don’t think it ever claims to be anything else. It’s just that, in typical Jeremy Saulnier’s fashion, Rebel Ridge is willing to go whether other action movies aren’t in order to sell its point and I’m not sure than the undertext of systemic power and racial tension really serves the movie as it has one foot in the real and one foot in Sam Peckinpah's territory. The action scenes are worth two hours of your time themselves.

You want to see a man take out an entire team of highly armed professionals with only smoke grenades? Rebel Ridge is for you.

Twelve Years Old Karate Fantasy

What the fuck is wrong then? Why am I not head-over-heels AGAIN over a Jeremy Saulnier movie? I don’t know. I feel like the-moral-outisder-wiping-an-entire-town-full-of-corrupt-cops-and-saves-the-broken-girl trope is something that twelve years old me could’ve come up with after I’d finished watching a karate movie. It lacks nuance. Adults have these broken parts and jagged edges to them that I didn’t find in the protagonist or the antagonist of Rebel Ridge. There's literal embodiments of good and evil.

I'm a big Jeremy Saulnier guy, but his previous screenplay threaded more morally difficult and challenging territory. I mean where is the soldier who stabbed his own platoon mate? Where is the broken man seeking total annihilation? Social climate has changed a lot over the last couple years and it’s probably much more difficult to get a movie that features dark themes and challenging morals produced, but this is not the answer. Rebel Ridge works, but it doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.

*

I'm being insanely critical here, but Rebel Ridge is fine. The execution is stellar as always and it’s one of these movies that ratchets up tension up to a point you get physically uncomfortable watching it. I was just disappointed by the clean cut political angle it took as Jeremy Saulnier is not really a political filmmaker. He loves to film dudes duking it out at the edge of existence. I kind of got that in Rebel Ridge, but not really. There a world worth not giving up on for Terry Richmond and it felt out of tune.

7.1/10

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