Rebel Ridge (2024)
An ex-Marine skilled in martial arts takes on a corrupt backwoods police force
Aaron Pierre is a troubled, two-fisted ex-Marine ready to go the distance for retribution
Rebel Ridge (2024)
Streaming on Netflix
This is an action flick with trustworthiness, filmed to dazzle in the trimmest style. Jeremy Saulnier, the writer-director, gives his shots a hard edge, an irresistible, spiky thereness.
He’s so sleek and swift that he catches you off guard, gets you caring about his two protagonists before you realize all that’s at stake. Saulnier doesn’t provide hand-holding set-ups to keep an audience clued in. Thrill-a-minute is in his bloodstream, and he pipes it hot right onto the screen.
As the movie opens, ex-Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is bicycling toward the police station in Shelby Springs, a rural Alabama town surrounded by dense forest. Terry is on a good Samaritan mission. He’s come to bail out his young cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc), who’s being held for 90 days on a simple misdemeanor drug charge.
That lengthy detention for a minor offense is suspicious, but Terry’s not looking for explanations. He just wants to bail Mike out before the young detainee is transferred to a state prison, where he faces grave harm. Mike is a cooperating witness in a capital murder case, and a prison gang will do anything to silence him.
But before Terry even reaches the station, his bike is rammed from behind by a police car, toppling him onto the pavement. He’d been listening to music through ear buds and hadn’t heard the squad car’s sirens.
Not that the two sneering officers, with guns drawn, care. They handcuff him, haul him to his feet and search his backpack. Well, lookee here. They pull out $36,000 in cash. Terry explains he’s come by the money legally working in a restaurant where he’s just resigned.
A $10,000 chunk, he tells the officers, will bail out Mike, and the rest is earmarked for the pair to start a new business.
Honesty gets Terry nowhere. Since Mike is in for a minor drug charge, selling weed, the cops peremptorily declare Terry’s cash drug money and seize it, ordering him to be on his way.
This outrage isn’t a screenwriter's invention. In fact, under a practice called “civil asset forfeiture”, police can legally retain money seized under possibly criminal circumstances. No actual crime need be committed. The money’s previous owner has to sue the state to get it back.
And so Terry is icily informed when he arrives at the police station to press charges against the officers. Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) coldly explains that the department will be keeping the money. Terry’s only recourse is the courts. He’s lucky not to have been arrested and needs to leave town now. And not come back.
Don Johnson as Chief Sandy Burnne warning Terry to back off his dangerous probing
Undaunted, back Terry comes, brazenly stealing $10,000 for Mike’s bail from the police holding room. Alas, he’s too late. Before the bail can be processed, Mike is transferred to state prison, where the gang needing to keep him quiet stabs him to death.
An enraged Terry now wants retribution from an evil carceral system, and his determination to outwit rogue police power deepens and darkens. The heroic lengths he goes to kept me on his side. His Marine background as a martial arts instructor suggested these arrogant cops didn’t understand who they were messing with.
The plot’s complications intensify when Terry gets help from the movie’s other protagonist, Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb), a clerk in the city courts. She’s a single mother and former addict who’s now clean and only 16 credits away from securing a law degree.
Her legal smarts have convinced her the police are ripping off drug offenders by stealing their cash, charging them for low level offenses, and freeing them once they pledge never to report the money stolen from them.
She lets Terry know that this scam has snared far more prisoners than Mike for a bogus 90-day stretch. She’s found documents proving that the cash police have extorted totals hundreds of thousands of dollars. It goes – legally, as it turns out – to fund the force, pay others on the city payroll, even underwrite municipal tax cuts.
What keeps the movie gripping is the way Saulnier, as writer and director, refuses to lapse into a moralist’s lofty righteousness.
Aaron Pierre’s subtly shaded work sets him beside Glen Powell as the hot action discovery of the year. His sarcasm sounds like it comes right from the American racial quagmire, yet he never overplays the peril of a Black man in a remote racist Southern landscape.
Summer and Terry make an unexpected sleuthing duo. The cops figure out that they’re in league and try frightening Summer into backing off. Since she’s helped Terry understand Mike’s arrest within the larger extortionist operation, he vows to protect her, putting himself in greater danger.
This unlikely pairing holds the picture together and keeps the byzantine plot buzzing. Had Saulnier’s script featured only rippling muscled Terry as avenger we’d have another Rambo-like “thriller”, where the murderous thugs who aren’t blown to smithereens are predictably sent to the clink.
Instead, Saulnier partners Terry and the vulnerable Summer, who’s staying clean to keep custody of her daughter. When the malicious cops, to get Summer fired, pump her full of drugs, Terry sees how she’s now in jeopardy as deep as his.
Indeed, once the dirty cops learn she’s helped Terry secure evidence of the fraud, killing both of them looks like their only safe move.
What keeps the movie gripping is the way Saulnier, as writer and director, refuses to lapse into a moralist’s lofty righteousness. Terry, Summer, Chief Burrnes and his motley cop cohort are all shot in clean close ups, mostly in daylight, with nighttime rarely shadowing their actions.
With this beautifully balanced acting ensemble, all playing people who grow increasingly desperate for both good and bad reasons, we need to see them in the plain light of day, and Saulnier gives them no place to hide.
Aaron Pierre’s subtly shaded work sets him beside Glen Powell as the hot action discovery of the year. His sexiness is all the more hypnotic here for being held in reserve (there’s no implied romance with Summer). A Brit, Pierre conveys American badassery with a measured fierceness he amps up slowly as Terry’s troubles thicken.
His sarcasm sounds like it comes right from the American racial quagmire, yet he never overplays the peril of a Black man in a remote racist Southern landscape.
We sense him calculating the menace he faces, but he doesn’t anchor the performance in panic or anxiety. Terry is remarkably fearless, so when he strikes back it seems both personal and unstoppable without feeling overtly political.
AnnaSophia Robb has worked for more than a decade in TV and movies, yet her acting here feels disarmingly fresh and unselfconscious. When Summer confides in Terry about her past addiction, her divorce, losing custody of her daughter, the actress opens up a well of sadness that I didn’t see coming.
AnnaSophia Robb is Summer, who risks her future to help uncover the town’s corruption
The script’s tightening of the bond between the two isn’t overstated, which means Summer feels weak and ashamed only momentarily. She grows stronger after she’s shared her story, and Robb’s depiction of Summer’s victimization by vicious cops becomes all the more touching.
After decades watching Don Johnson play cool to rogue cops, it’s marvelous to see him here being not just vile but fluently, musically noxious, as if bullying were an instrument he’s studied and mastered.
His oily Southern accent reeks entitlement, intimidation and an irrepressible thrill at inflicting pain. Johnson is old enough now to sound world-weary when he’s being cruel, and he speaks with a chipper, sing-songy, pathological lilt. He doesn’t just depict depravity here; he hums it like a maestro.
This is a sturdily built genre piece, honed to do what escapist moviemaking does best, make us shiver not at the fantastical but at what life, when it skids off the rails, might scarily morph into.
It ends with a loud, chaotic, almost circusy action sequence, peppered with guns, smoke bombs and crunching violence. I beheld with wonder. It was improbable but had a moral undertone that made me believe it could happen, revealing people at their worst and best in a single riotous moment.
Kaleidoscopic and propulsive, it showed Terry fighting for the right, while struggling not to do wrong. That’s the knife edge that the best, most satisfying action movies walk. With this story at its wild corkscrew end, the real action, the morality play being lived out, was still spinning in my mind.