Director Joe Carnahan has two truly great films on his resume: Narc from 2002, starring Ray Liotta and Jason Patric in a Sidney Lumet-esque corrupt-cop drama, and 2011’s The Grey, a surprisingly philosophical man-versus-nature film led by Liam Neeson. The pickings have been slim for Carnahan over the last fifteen years, and while The Rip may not crest the heights of Narc or The Grey, it is a relative return to form for the director.
The Rip gets a lot of mileage from the easy chemistry of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, as two Miami cops with a long working history together. Damon and Affleck’s off-and-on-screen friendship creates a shorthand between their two characters that comes across as compelling and authentic. Damon plays Dane, a lieutenant heading up a tactical narcotics team, with Affleck as Sergeant JD Byrne, his second in command. The crew is rounded out by a high-caliber group of actors, including Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, and Catalina Sandino Moreno (hats off to the casting director).
The film begins with the execution-style murder of a detective who both Dane and JD are close to. The significance of her death drives the film in ways that are at first less obvious but increasingly notable as it progresses. After receiving a tip that a sizable sum of cartel money is in a Hialeah stash house, the film kicks into overdrive when the team discovers the cash on hand in the rundown home is far more than they expected. It’s a level of money that the holder will not give up without a fight.
Once in the house, Dane, JD, and team (which includes a rascally cash and coke-sniffing beagle named Wilbur) encounter the occupant, a young woman named Desi (well-played by Sasha Calle), who swears to know nothing, that she’s just attending to the affairs of her recently deceased grandmother, who left her the home.
From there, The Rip turns into a twisty thriller where every member of Dane’s crew has their motivations questioned. Something is definitely rotten in this Hialeah stashouse. Dane and JD both present as cops who have seen too much, and burnout is not only an inevitability, but it may already have arrived. $20 million of drug money has a way of skewing the mind, especially for cops making $80,000 a year while living in a major city.
The moral dilemma of whether to pocket the money isn’t the only problem before the quintet of cops. As they count the money and discuss what to do with it, mysterious and threatening calls are made to the house. The streets are watching them, and they have only a limited time to clear out or face dire consequences.
The setup may not be overly novel, but Carnahan’s ability to ratchet up tension within the confines of the domicile is expert. His use of camera angles, score, and extended shots (particularly one in which Damon and Yeun go on a short walk down the block outside the stash house) all create a riveting, transfixing level of dread. One thing Carnahan has always been good at is building audience anxiety until the screen explodes with moments of mayhem. The storyline of The Rip plays to Carnahan’s strengths, and when all hell breaks loose, it does so with palpable and muscular alacrity.
As transfixing as the first two-thirds of the film may be, a plot twist involving a DEA agent (played by the ever-reliable Kyle Chandler) doesn’t land with nearly the amount of force that Carnahan and the film’s producers and stars (Damon and Affleck) might have liked. The reveal is neither as clever nor as surprising as it needs to be to achieve the jaw-dropping effect the film aims for. Once the cat is out of the bag, The Rip devolves into a sturdy highway chase scene that is fine as far as it goes, but overall, it is rudimentary.
Where the film excels is in its palpably intense middle section when the audience is trying to sort out who among the cops is on the level, and who is on the take. Thanks to Damon, Affleck (who has become a very fine actor as he’s reached middle age), Yeun, Taylor, and Moreno, the central portion of The Rip is compulsively watchable and unnerving. Still, I don’t want to be too hard on The Rip for failing to stick the landing. There is much to admire in Carnahan’s movie. During the dregs of January, when most films that aren’t deemed award-worthy get dumped, The Rip is more than just a pleasant diversion. It’s a gritty, well-acted, and, for a while at least, a film bordering on cop movie greatness. That it falls short and winds up being merely good is hardly an insult. Netflix original films without Oscar intentions are often rote, paint-by-numbers affairs. Carnahan, Damon, and Affleck make sure that The Rip is more than that, even if the movie doesn’t hit the center of its intended target.
The Rip is streaming now on Netflix.
