Review: Rebel Ridge (2024)

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Rebel Ridge is a taut thriller with a terrific lead performance and an impressive level of tension in its various set pieces. The latest film from Blue Ruin and Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier, the movie is a return to form after the disappointing Alaska-set mystery, Hold the Dark, from 2018. Unlike Hold the Dark, Rebel Ridge is more of a piece with Green Room, as it puts a protagonist in the wrong place at the wrong time and pits him against a bunch of hateable, cowardly villains. While the villains of Green Room were a gang of neo-Nazis outside Portland led by a club owner played by Patrick Stewart, the villains of Rebel Ridge are a bunch of Southern cops led by a scumbag chief played by Don Johnson. Both films establish a time and place, ratchet the tension, and then let it uncoil. Green Room is the better movie, but both are unmistakably the work of the same artist.

The film’s plot description sounds like a fantasy for ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) supporting people. Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is biking to the courthouse outside a small town when some cops try to pull him over. He can’t hear them over the sound of the heavy metal he’s listening to, so they clip his bike and send him tumbling to the ground. As he’s a big, intimidating black man, they frisk him, search his things, and find a bag of cash. It’s money for his cousin’s bail, he says, but the cops claim that they suspect it’s drug money and confiscate it. He needs the money but the cops won’t budge and because of the legal parameters of civil asset forfeiture (it would cost more money to fight them in court than the money he’d get back), he’s shit out of luck. But he doesn’t take kindly to that, and unbeknownst to the cops, Terry is an ex-marine responsible for training other marines in martial arts.

Like John Rambo before him, Terry becomes a one-man wrecking crew and wages a guerilla operation against the entire small-town police department. Also like Rambo (at least in First Blood) he doesn’t resort to lethal force, instead disarming and debilitating the various cops who refuse to give him his money back so that he can save his cousin from a gang waiting to kill him when he reaches state prison.

As Terry plots to get his money back, he connects with a local courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb) who is also training to become a lawyer, and together they realize that the police department’s scheme is more than petty corruption: it’s a system-wide rot. So as we watch Terry face down the police department, we also learn the ins and outs of civil asset forfeiture, how dashboard cameras in cop cars work, and how police rehabilitation measures over the past decade can be perverted to empower corrupt police departments instead of fixing them.

All told, the plot is a little too busy for a thriller with such an elegant set-up, which holds Rebel Ridge back from being as good as First Blood. For instance, if you don’t pay careful attention to every moment, you might miss something crucial about the cop’s crooked scheme and how it affects every aspect of the small town. Luckily, the action scenes are great and Saulnier once again proves that he’s masterful in mining tension.

A scene about 30 minutes into the movie captures Saulnier’s talent for tension and release. After thinking he has struck a deal with Johnson’s chief to get his money back and bail out his cousin, Terry arrives at the police station only to see the bus taking his cousin to state prison driving off down the road. Too bad, Johnson’s police chief says, you just missed him. He pushed up his transfer just to mess with Terry. Terry races after the bus to speak to his cousin through the window and goes to borrow some money from his old boss to bail his cousin out. But his old boss tells him he can’t send the money because the cops raided his restaurant; Terry implicated him in the so-called drug conspiracy when Terry told the cops he got the initial bundle of cash from buying out his stake in the restaurant. So Terry returns to the police station, ready to escalate his approach, just as the police chief has escalated his.

Standing out front defiantly as a bunch of workers dig ground in the background, Terry waits for Johnson’s police chief to come outside and confront him, like a gunslinger outside the saloon—Saulnier is careful to emphasize the dustiness of the ground in the wide shots, so we don’t miss the Western association. The chief does come out and explains how he did it all just so Terry could watch the shit-eating grin on his face. Terry isn’t impressed, but the chief isn’t worried.

As the two men stand off like cowboys facing down in the street, inside the station, one of the cops runs background info on Terry and tries to decipher what a certain acronym on his army profile, MCMAP, means. But the internet crashes before they learn the answer and they have to reboot the Wi-Fi. Saulnier cuts back outside and Terry gets a little bit closer to the chief. The chief is getting annoyed. Terry shouldn’t push him. Just then, we cut back inside to get the answer to MCMAP: Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. The cop rushes out, but it’s too late. Terry snaps to and disarms the chief. The fuse is lit. The rest of the movie is watching the fireworks.

This isn’t to say that Rebel Ridge is like John Wick, a movie that’s essentially one unbroken action scene. Rebel Ridge doesn’t showcase Terry as some invincible wrecking crew. Or, to make another contrast to a famous action movie, Rebel Ridge is not a feature-length version of the scene in Terminator 2 where the Terminator defeats an entire SWAT team through nonlethal force, shooting gas canisters through a grenade launcher—although Saulnier definitely references that scene. Rather, Rebel Ridge takes its time, flowing between action scenes and cat-and-mouse games, all while deepening the investigation and raising the stakes. Along the way, we get a bunch of references, not only to movies like First Blood and Terminator 2, but also to history and culture. Saulnier is making a thriller, but he’s also showcasing the ways that American systems rot and how corruption can perpetuate within a rotten system.

The film’s title, Rebel Ridge, is meant to refer to a battlefield in the fictional Southern town in which its set, presumably a Confederate stronghold where some brave graybacks made a last stand. The association connects these cops to the Confederates, two morally corrupt groups refusing to reform with the times. But it also makes us think of Ruby Ridge, where the federal government used excessive force to turn a weapons violation into a deadly standoff. Thus, the title is about morally corrupt institutional resistance, as well as escalation and deescalation, concepts that Terry himself discusses with the chief.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how good Aaron Pierre is as Terry. As an actor, he’s tall and elegant, with striking brown eyes and an imposing stillness. We don’t learn a ton about Terry beyond what he tells us about his training and his aspirations for the future: he’s an ex-marine, he owned a share in a Chinese restaurant, he wants to make an honest living hauling boats. But he doesn’t need to tell us more because Pierre tells us so much through his eyes and his subtle reactions. Terry is a stoic badass, but he’s not robotic, and we witness his steely fortitude break throughout the film. Those moments reveal who Terry is, what he wants, what makes him tick, more than any exposition could.

Rebel Ridge is an impressive movie. The only thing holding it back, aside from the slight busyness of the plotting, is the ending, which, suffice to say, ends things in a bold, if slightly spurious, manner. I’ll continue to wrestle with the ending and how it shifts the nature of the film’s critique of law enforcement and institutional corruption, but even some trepidation over the ending doesn’t dispel the film’s effect. This is a riveting, intelligent movie, one that proves that tension isn’t absent in the American action-thriller genre.

8 out of 10

Rebel Ridge (2024, USA)

Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier; starring Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman, Emory Cohen, Steve Zsiss, Zsané Jhé, Dana Lee, James Cromwell.

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