Movie Review – Rebel Ridge
Principal Cast : Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman, Emory Cohen, Steve Zissis, Zsane Jhe, Dana Lee, James Cromwell.
Synopsis: An ex-Marine grapples his way through a web of small-town corruption when an attempt to post bail for his cousin escalates into a violent standoff with the local police chief.
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What’s this? A Netflix film I can actually recommend? A legitimately great streaming movie that delivers on thrills and character work? Astounding! Despite being marketed as some Taken-genre action blockbuster, Jeremy Saulnier’s (Blue Ruin, Hold The Dark) Rebel Ridge is actually a tighly written, circumspect, and emotionally centered movie that elicits plenty of outrage from the viewer, before the central hero – a highly trained military type, of course – takes the fight to the corrupt cops of a backwater town in America. With a compelling lead performance by Aaron Pierre, and able support from a slimy, villainous Don Johnson, not to mention a strong secondary turn from AnnaSophia Robb, Rebel Ridge might feel like a cliched revenge story from the outset, but it soon sets itself apart as more a thinking person’s actioner, and is quite well done.
In the town of Shelby Springs, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre – Old) has come to post bail for his cousin and to buy a truck, but his savings are unjustly seized by a corrupt local police force led by Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson – Django Unchained, Knives Out). Terry, a specialist in military combat training, aims to retrieve the bail money and keep his cousin from being transferred to the state penitentiary, with the help of court clerk Summer McBride (AnnaSophie Robb – Bridge To Terabithia) who also unearths a widespread conspiracy within Shelby Springs.
It’s the kind of story that never seems to get old: a group of powerful people pick a fight with somebody who has the power or training to bring them down, and naturally they ignore all warnings to step away. It’s the “special set of skills” for Aaron Pierre’s ubiquitously quiet Terry Richmond that aren’t really expanded on other than a brief sidebar dialogue moment – the shocked look on actress Zsane Jhe’s face as her character realises just how much deep shit the corrupt local police force is really in sells the film’s principal hook – although despite a generic “he’s a badass” character beat there’s an awful lot that goes right for Rebel Ridge. The film is written, edited and directed by Saulnier, a filmmaker whose oeuvre to-date have been conspicuously contemplative thrillers (not counting Green Room, which by all accounts is a genuinely terrifying horror movie), and so it stands to reason that the guy would return to his somewhat broken, quietly spoken hero archetype for this often restrained vengeance-thriller. Terry is a man who is just trying to get his life back on track, as well as that of his incarcerated cousin, before he runs headlong into Chief Burnne and his lackeys, Officers’ Evan Marston (David Denman) and Steve Lann (Emory Cohen), who bully, racially profile, and eventually harass Terry into snapping, taking out his well-deserved revenge in a blistering (but quite non-lethal) offensive play.
It’s weird that a film can be so tremendously taut despite the well-stated ideology that Terry won’t kill. He disarms, retreats, uses the enemy’s power against them, but he never kills. It’s an indictment on this viewer that I actually hoped he’d pop a cap in Don Johnson’s beautifully corrupt face and give us the satisfaction, but Saulnier doesn’t release that. Terry Richmond is a far better man than I, I guess; and although I can forgive the film’s lack of body-count in hand-to-hand combat, the stakes are elevated through a series of other tragic circumstances that threaten Terry’s moral code. There is violence, don’t mistake me, and some of the injury inflicted on the various cops Terry comes up against is startlingly brutal (an arm-break late in the film is wince-worthy), but the character’s intrinsic valuing of human life makes him a quiet-spoken but ultimately virtuous hero. In some respects, the film would work brilliantly even without the AnnaSophia Robb character inclusion; she’s a local court clerk who uncovers a web of deceit and human misery within the town’s police force, and is struggling with her own inner demons and past, and whereas this could have been a nothing role with minimal emotional connection to the primary narrative, Robb, Pierre and Saulnier ensure enough space is given to the B-plot to make it work, and work well.
I had a whole load of fun with Rebel Ridge. It’s a fairly uncomplicated plot, some tight scripting and well-trod character beats, and although it does run a little long for my liking the effect of Saulnier’s gritty, realistic direction and Aaron Pierre’s square-jawed, masculine performance engages more than just the testosterone, it does a fair job of tantalising the braincells as well. Again, those looking for a John Wick action blast will likely be disappointed in the lack of action the film carries, but when it needs to it absolutely delivers. That Terry isn’t an invincible superhero character also helps, the fact he can bleed and be injured only elevates the inherent tension on whether he will actually succeed, and so I applaud Saulnier for making the film feel genuinely lived in. It will also provoke – hopefully – discussion around US police’s ability to confiscate property from suspected criminals (a process known as Civil Forfeiture) and how it is used in a negative light to disenfranchise some people, an element that forms the plot’s inciting incident, into perhaps some legal change being made somewhere along the line. In any case, it’s an enraging rights violation that kicks off Rebel Ridge’s comeuppance-driven storyline, and it manifests into righteous anger for both the characters and the viewer once all’s said and done. A rarity among the sewerage pipe of Netlifx content delivery, Rebel Ridge is hugely entertaining and delivers some low-key thrills and action with a solid cast, thanks to Jeremy Saulnier’s visceral, of somewhat restrained, direction. Highly recommended.
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