
dir: Jeremy Saulnier
2024
If you know what to expect from Jeremy Saulnier as a director, then nothing you see in this film should come as a complete shock to you (even when shocking things occur).
I can’t imagine it’s a group containing legions of people, but his second and third films at least are loved by a certain type of film nerd. Blue Ruin and Green Room are rightly prized as keen examples of a meticulous approach to directing and storytelling, and to the escalation of tension in the delivery of a rollicking ride for the attentive viewer.
I have no idea what Hold the Dark is like, but if it’s anything like everything else he’s done, it should proceed with all the fussiness and precision of a Swiss watch.
Just like this does. Rebel Ridge contains not a single wasted second of screen time or a single wasted word of dialogue. Everything is in the absolute service of delivering the story in the most precise fashion possible. It’s what he does.
And yes, despite the seeming familiarity of the subject matter: An outsider being treated like shit by the cops in a country town, only to turn the tables on them for sweet, sweet revenge, the real villain is civil asset forfeiture.
You read that right: in a country where everyone has guns, no-one takes responsibility for anything, and where no-one wants to pay any taxes, the idea is that cop shops will fund themselves through confiscating funds from criminal activities.
That sounds like a great idea. I am sure that cops, who are known for their honesty and forthrightness, would never find ways to abuse such a system.
I mean, what if they worked the system such that someone didn’t even have to be found guilty of committing a crime in order to have their money or assets taken away from them?
Imagine a circumstance where a grandmother has her entire house and car seized by the cops because her son sells a couple of grams of marijuana to undercover cops while sitting on her porch. The cops make the argument that since the criminal used the house to commit the crime, they deserved to take the house and whatever else wasn’t nailed down because, hey, they were part of a criminal enterprise, and it’s ever so legal.
It happened, and not that long ago, in Philadelphia, not even one of those Southern states that still acts like they didn’t lose the war. You don’t even have to look up the ethnicity of the people involved to know they were Black. You intuitively knew it.
You think it’s going to be used by cops to use some of the massive treasure hordes of convicted drug dealers (which happens under criminal asset forfeiture) to make up for budget shortfalls, or to hire more staff, or to update their computer systems or some shit like that, but of course the way they actually use it is to rip whoever they feel like off, and to give the victims no legal recourse even when they’re not crims, with only the suspicion of criminal activity (as with cases of civil forfeiture).
I am clearly an expert on this topic, because I dimly recall an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that I saw a couple of years ago.
It's real, and it’s fucked, and this entire film is based around the idea that it is a bonkers and legalised form of corruption that needs to be knocked on the head.
Not like the other problems with police, which definitely shouldn’t be addressed and definitely don’t need to change.
It personifies this unfairness in the form of Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre). He’s just a guy on a bike riding down a country road. Unfortunately for him, he’s wearing noise-cancelling headphones to best listen to Iron Maiden.
And then a cop runs him off the road. In the ensuing encounter, there’s that tension. Do you know the tension I’m talking about? It’s that one despite the politeness and calmness of the person being threatened by the cops, there’s always that feeling like they could murder him with barely any reason required.
We were afraid for our lives, they will say afterwards, and that will be the end of that.
Terry, or at least the actor playing him, is never less than calm, never less than commanding, despite the fact that through his calm and measured conversation with the police, he is rendered entirely powerless, plus they steal the money he’s carrying which he desperately needed to get to a court house in order to bail out his cousin. The cops make the determination that the money he has on him might be the proceeds of crime, therefore they’re going to seize it, and he will have no recourse to contest their decision or to get it back. He can prove that it’s not the proceeds of crime, and it doesn’t matter.
It’s enough to make anyone’s blood boil.
Not Terry, though. The steely look in his eye only gets steelier.
He politely goes into town and tries every courteous method he can in order to save his cousin, bringing him to the attention of the police chief (Don Johnson), who is clearly a corrupt piece of shit and not just following orders, not like all the cops on his payroll, who are just going through the motions they’ve been trained to do.
And the court seems to be in on it, with the whole system being broken against even clearly innocent people.
The more Terry presses, the more he’s told to fuck off. And fuck off he will not.
This felt like a long arse film to me. Saulnier so carefully crafts the bureaucratic infrastructure around this corrupt process such that we’re eventually yelling “we get it, it’s bad and unfair, now get on with it” at the screen, but get on with it he does not. As this is a problem in the ‘real’ world outside of movies, the film also tries to craft a resolution that is less in line with what audiences might expect from a fictional movie, especially one that looks like it’s an action film, and something more in line with a ‘real world’ or realistic response. Of course, that is purest nonsense, since I don’t recall of any instances where a highly competent and well trained individual managed to take on the hierarchy of an entire police force with non-lethal methods and martial arts techniques. But at the very least the film is saying since the corruption the cops are committing is against people’s money and assets, it’s not sufficiently justified to have Terry go on a kill crazy rampage.
Hence why people keep mentioning Rambo: First Blood in relation to this movie, and why it’s not really the same thing at all.
Even if both protagonists are ex-military, and both are treated very unfairly by the local constabulary, one of them is in a persecuted fugue state from PTSD from surviving the Vietnam War, and the other is an ex-Marine who mastered how to beat several shades of shit out of people, and how to manipulate, escalate or de-escalate people and situations to the best tactical benefit of his objectives.
The result is never in doubt, but it’s about how we get there. The director works out each and every step he wants taken from A to B to Z and everything in between, and takes us through every goddamn procedural step along the way. It made for something of a frustrating watch, even when the cops go from being casually corrupt within the letter of the law to openly murderous and far more competent than they should be, but nothing they do surprises Terry. With that far-off steel-eyed gaze, he has predicted and accounted for almost everything.
He has pretty much only one ally, being Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a court clerk who sympathises but is powerless , but she’s really only there for Terry to exposit to, and sometimes to exposit to him. She deserved a little bit better than the multiple murder attempts from the cops, designed to look like ODs.
That Terry doesn’t appear to have much of a life or a character outside of this flick was not a problem for me. He is, after all, Purpose and Intention personified. That he is similarly magnificent in his physique and commanding in all his altercations doesn’t detract in the slightest: this is virtually a Jack Reacher film with plenty of the same tortured exposition and the same relentlessness.
And that’s not a problem for me, since I enjoy watching the Reacher Amazon series.
Sure, Rebel Ridge could have been trimmed of half an hour, and I would have been even happier, but then that abrupt ending would be just as shocking and yet still satisfying – what more would we have needed at that point?
Rebel Ridge is a solid banger of a flick, strong in its depiction of a clearly unfair legal manoeuvre abused by the police across the whole country, taut in its action scenes and its dialogue delivery, and pretty much one of the flicks of the year.
8 times I would not want to see that steely gaze fall upon my watery eyes with ill-intent out of 10
--
“You could offer me eternal life or a catfish sandwich and the answer would still be the same, specially since you stopped calling me "sir", which about was the only thing you had going for you.” – why is Don Johnson so good at playing racists anyway? - Rebel Ridge
- 392 reads