USA, — When it’s revealed fairly early in “Rebel Ridge” – a dynamite piece of new Netflix programming that does everything and then some to absolve itself of Netflix programming prejudices – that the racist-as-hell Police Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) is gunning for sheriff, we expect that that detail will blossom into a whole plotline. This is a drama, after all. Wouldn’t the drama be most gripping when our hero, Terry (Aaron Pierre), takes down Burnne as he’s taking the oath to serve, and after we’ve just spent the film’s first act watching him shrug off accusations that two of his officers assaulted Terry before stealing thousands of dollars meant to bail his cousin out of jail, accusing it of being drug money?
Perhaps it would. I don’t doubt writer-director Jeremy Saulnier knows it, too. But this is a filmmaker who gets down and dirty in societal machinations, dipping into the grime underneath civilization’s fingernails where motivations are sharper, blood is redder and reckonings feel immensely personal. No, Saulnier wouldn’t let Burnne, nor the cutthroat systems of modern policing he represents, go quietly. And it creates a prickliness to see the universe of “Rebel Ridge” contained to ostensibly pleasant, small-town backroads you might see on a postcard, with the bigger picture merely implied in every ultimatum and burst of fury. It hits all the harder for it.
And so does Terry, though he gives Burnne and his militant forces more than enough opportunities to douse the approaching fire before it engulfs the entire town of Shelby Springs. Here, power preys on the marginalized; police budgets are comprised of seized assets and the county clerk, good-hearted as he is relative to Emory Cohen’s horrific Officer Lann, breaks a heavier sweat over the potato salad he’s bringing to a neighborhood pot-luck than Terry’s desperation at getting his cousin out of jail before he’s taken to a different facility—and into harm’s way.
So Terry, a former Marine who knows a thing or 50 about close-quarters combat, gets to work in a prolonged and stupendously white-knuckle stretch that sees a Black man taking on the white entitlement which has wronged him, revealing the stench so it can’t be ignored any longer. At its down-and-dirty simplest, the first 40 or so minutes of “Rebel Ridge” is basic cause and effect and carnage, which makes it all the more damning to observe how the movie’s most entitled characters can’t see the next domino is about to fall, or which gun it’ll be shot out of. The sheer momentum is dizzying, and only further buoyed by performances from Pierre and Johnson that don’t immediately divulge the lengths each man is willing to go to. (There’s such grit and glamour in Pierre’s star-making turn, and if Hollywood is smart his agent’s phone bills will skyrocket this fall.)
Like Saulnier’s past films, “Rebel Ridge” structures itself around the inevitability of violence while having us ponder what the rupture would mean for our characters. That goes for every one of them, too: the restaurant owner who helps Terry to his own detriment; the Black female cop straddling complicated dynamics; another burly officer who might be more than a little distressed at the policies he’s enforcing. This is brace-yourself filmmaking that fully makes good on the promise that’s implied as Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” blares over the opening moments; poetically, it’s also what makes it difficult to tell who the suggested beast of this movie is. The night is black in the quiet town of Shelby Springs, and for its most vulnerable there’s no holding back.
If there’s a con here, it’s that “Rebel Ridge” can’t sustain the propulsive highs of that opening as characters’ positions clash on a chessboard of explosive risks. So Saulnier does one better than trying: He reveals new confidence in his storytelling by showing Terry’s initial fight was just one dimension of a deeper-rooted mold, and that there’s more to Burnne’s antagonism than sheer machismo. The movie responds in kind by evolving from snappy thrills to existential suspense with heavy implications about the cash cow that is discontent and paranoia, and the financial necessity for Burnne's goons to find wrongdoing where there is none. Cinematographer David Gallego underscores these ideas with his sly framing of faces in rear-view mirrors, while the music, by Brooke and Will Blair, further clues us in with guttural rumbles evoking the rotten infrastructure of Shelby Springs.
Saulnier’s last film was the visceral but overwrought “Hold the Dark,” and the first project he didn’t write. It’s clear that he picked up the pen once again for “Rebel Ridge,” which continues the evolution of narratively taut and unexpectedly layered stories that began with his “Blue Ruin” and “Green Room.” Those movies twisted genre conventions to investigate what lies in the dark alleys we drive past and think we can afford to ignore. This “First Blood” riff upends expectations in its own right; that the tension unspools largely in broad daylight emphasizes how wide-reaching the town’s conspiracies are, and we actually cheer when the police sirens eventually flip on.
This is to say that while the macabre “Hold the Dark” bared its fangs and taunted you to stick with it, “Rebel Ridge” is disarmingly casual, perhaps because of how causal it is. Whether it’s the tradition of policing-centric movies “Rebel Ridge” arrives on the heels of (“Serpico” is referenced at a pivotal juncture) or the closer interrogations of our modern world, it’s easy to understand the depths of Shelby Springs’ dark history even if we occasionally lose sight of how individual puppet’s strings are pulled once Terry discovers them. “Civil unrest is a growth industry around here,” Burnne says at one point. But there’s a sadness in our realizing the truth: In this town, it’s actually a bubble getting ready to burst.
What I wish I was writing is that “Rebel Ridge” is a rip-roaring good time at the movies. Such as it is, with the continued awkwardness of what Netflix does and doesn’t deem multiplex-worthy, it’s a rip-roaring good time at home, too. But being that it comes from a director whose filmography is as substantive as it sizzles with the uncompromising intimacy of revenge, some extra nuance is necessary.
So, a tweak: “Rebel Ridge” rips through systems of survivalist bureaucracy and roars with enough ambition to make us realize what we were missing in movies such as these. One of the movie’s smarter elements is the character of Summer, AnnaSophia Robb’s savvy attorney-in-training who slips into the movie early, seemingly out of nowhere. Initially just a means to translate just how bad Terry’s odds are, she ends up playing a much meatier and vital role than expected in this movie about the deliberate acts of villainy it takes to maintain a deteriorating sheen of normalcy. She and Terry, it turns out, are both in servitude to the systems they’re ensnared in, and we get just enough of a taste of their inner lives to understand why they’d want to strike back. Corruption tends to self-immolate, Saulnier suggests, and “Rebel Ridge” makes it viciously satisfying to watch the spark float towards the trail of gasoline.
"Rebel Ridge" is now streaming on Netflix. It is not rated, though bones do crunch and F-bombs are liberally deployed. Runtime: 2 hours, 11 minutes.
Starring Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman
Directed and written by Jeremy Saulnier
2024
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