With enough cast chemistry and tension to sustain itself, The Rip easily overcomes its narrative and action shortcomings.
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In a movie world that seems divided between auteur filmmakers and guns for hire, Joe Carnahan feels like the happy medium. He's a filmmaker who has a ton of signature elements and fascinations, while also not being a household name. Likely because Carnahan has spent most of his career making meat and potatoes action thrillers about cops and criminals with varieties in tone and scope. So who better to make a straightforward cop thriller starring real life best buddies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Netflix? And the end result? About what I expected (in a good way).
The Setup
The film opens with the murder of Miam Police Captain Jackie Velez, who is gunned down by two masked men. Incensed at the audacity and fearing a leak inside the unit, her second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon) leads an unplanned raid on a stash house to shake things loose. But when they discover an incredible amount of money, suspicions between the team begin to rise and threaten to turn them against one another.
The Rip is alright. Not a game-changer, outside of the bonus that the production company lobbied for if this movie is a streaming success, which should be industry standard, but about what I'd expect from Carnahan. A bunch of fast-talking grizzled cops playing a game of "who's corrupt?" for about 2 hours with bits of action peppered in to provide more drama.
As such, I'll get into what works really well and what could use a bit more polish.
Pro: Affleck and Damon
At this point in their careers, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon seem to have a pretty solid understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as performers. I'll demonstrate.
In this movie our two leads play two kinds of cops.
One is a bit quiet, keeps information close to the chest, has sporadic outbursts when he gets overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation, but generally looks to ask questions without pushing too hard.
Whereas our second guy is a bit of a loose cannon who is introduced by chain smoking cigarettes and yelling at a fed and will say the quite part out loud in most interactions.
As you probably guessed, Damon is the first one and Affleck is the second. With the archetypes lined up the movie can have fun using them to build or break tension by playing off of these strengths. Whether it's Damon casually saying something that sounds incriminating, while Affleck seems primed to say "what the actual f**k is going on?" every five minutes.
And they didn't need to be friends for this to work, but their natural chemistry also makes their scenes where they argue or hand off information feel familiar. Like they've done this before.
Con: Tepid Action
It's wild how hit or miss Carnahan is on the action side of the house. Broadly speaking he seems to do better when it goes for over-the-top set pieces or premises to his action beats, but when it comes to the nitty gritty or grounded stuff, he relies on early 2000s editing to sell the the intensity of the scene.
I think the The A-Team demonstrates this really well because the entire sequence with a tank falling out of the sky is the exact kind of physics defying fun I want from action movies and then the hand-to-hand combat and shootouts are chopped to hell and back.
And if you're movie is a grounded cop thriller...guess what all of the action is? Choppy tactical action.
It's really hard to tell what's going on in the shootouts unless there's a giant stunt involved, in which case Carnahan knows to highlight it, and the brief bits of hand-to-hand combat are edited so hard and dimly lit that piecing together who's winning and losing isn't clear until the end.
I feel like there were two paths here. Path One: Pepper in a few standoffs and rapid firefights and the tenor of the movie is mostly unchanged.
But maybe you sold this to Netflix as having a big action finale so you've got to make it. So Path Two is : Ok then. Let's make this section really sing then.
And The Rip lands in a functional but not thrilling middle ground between the two. Action because we need action. But not great action.
Pro: Pretty Solid "What's Going On?" Plotting
The twisty cop drama stuff is why you bring in Joe Carnahan. Partially because he likes to thread the needle between glorifying cops and highlighting really bad cops, but also because he's very good at dropping obvious breadcrumbs for the audience both in the script and with the visual language.
Here's an example, when Damon's Dumars announces he's going to find this stash house he doesn't give anyone a number. But because of the timing (end of day) and the job, each member of the team comes up to Dumars to ask how much money they're talking. All one after the other. And all of them are given a different number.
Nice little breadcrumb that raises suspicion all around, including onto to Damon's character because why would he do that?
He's also pretty good at integrating exposition into punchy conversation. See how an early interrogation weaves in the life stories of our two leads and problems within the department before they even speak other.
Carnahan also has fun with the audience by gauging who they should trust based on who the focal point is. So at one point we're focusing on the woman who's in the stash house's experience and she's listening in on something that sounds suspect, then on Affleck and Damon as they berate each other, and then to our two lady cops counting they money talking about how it could change their lives overnight. The lack of a fixed perspective keeps that tension high while also making it hard to determine what exactly is going on.
Con: Solid Characterization (But All At The End)
The downside to a twisty thriller where everyone is treated with suspicion, it makes it pretty hard to offer up a lot of characterization. Because if you humanize a character too much or too little, it'll shift suspicions too strongly.
Which is why it's so odd that the movie more or less offers up an epilogue to do...almost all of the characterization the movie hadn't done up to that point.
Saying who it involves would constitute spoilers, but I definitely felt as I watched that these scenes were pretty well-written and acted...I just wished they happened earlier after all of the dominoes have started to drop.
The Verdict: It's Alright
With enough cast chemistry and tension to sustain itself, The Rip easily overcomes its narrative and action shortcomings. 6/10
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