Review: Rebel Ridge

Director:  Jeremy Saulnier

Stars:  Aaron Pierre, AnnaSophia Robb, Don Johnson

Jeremy Saulnier has made a sturdy career out of retooling the mythos of the American revenge saga to his pleasing, winning over critics with the one-two punch of Blue Ruin and Green Room. Six years ago, however, he took a stumble with Hold the Dark. While it certainly continued this investigation into acts of reprisal on the fringes of marginalised America, it was a cold and unforgiving slog. Now, six years on, he returns with a bone dry thriller for Netflix, one that teases Assault on Precinct 13 style action, but which delivers something more studied, calculated and almost Cormac McCarthy-esque in its sparse, mechanical progressions. There is action, for the patient, but it is delivered late on, fulfilling a promise made in the first act while building on its resonances. For a film in large part about police brutality and abuses of power, it is slyly innovative in its politicised use of non-lethal (but still shocking) force.

Initially it comes on like First Blood. Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) – a former marine now in civvies – is batted from his bicycle in rural Louisiana within the first minute of the movie, knocked to the ground by a police cruiser he couldn’t hear thanks to his earphones. Rushing across county to bail out his cousin Michael (C.J. LeBlanc) as a matter of some urgency, Terry is quietly frustrated when his mission gets balled up in bureaucratic red tape. The cops confiscate his $36K on a BS suspicion that it’s drug currency and Terry finds himself racing against the clock and rural prejudices to get the money back from the local chief (Don Johnson).

Saulnier has hunkered down on this one. This is not the realm of lean, mean street violence and bloody shootouts, instead sprawling into a down-to-earth investigation into the methods and motivations of police corruption. Terry is aided and abetted by law clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), who sniffs out a larger chain of similar cases, triggering a more wide-sweeping response from Don Johnson’s Chief Sandy Burnne. Soon the sunny grasslands and moldy silos of Shelby Springs become a tactical combat zone for the well-trained and adaptable Terry, more commonly inclined to stealth mode and surgical precision than brawny confrontations.

Saulnier’s blame within the system keeps coming back to bureaucracies of arbitrary rigidity, by which I mean mandatory sentencing, capped budgets and the numbers game of arrest targets. He draws, in the abstract, a sense of law enforcement tied in knots, operating outside of the law in an effort to main and control it. Law breeds lawlessness. Terry’s civil asset forfeiture is just the tip of an iceberg that Rebel Ridge chips at with straight-faced intrigue.

Terry flexes his skills from the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program in a quick-turn standoff with Burnne relatively early in the picture, but its not until much later that these abilities are rolled out to fuller effect. The defunded parish has been re-kitted with riot gear in an effort to stifle the stigma of police violence but this has only served to instigate a hushed-up stockpiling of street seizures. This well seeded tidbit turns the final showdown into something smartly original. Armed with snatched-up non-lethal weaponry, Terry embarks on a standoff set in the ethereal clouds of smoke bombs. If that sounds like a feint from Saulnier’s almost trademark blood-letting, have no fear. There’s still room for wound-plugging and bone-snapping. You’ll still have opportunities to wince.

But these very decisions nudge Rebel Ridge into some more inherently interesting territory for an ostensibly meat’n’potatoes genre effort. Overuse of force is a red button topic, and depictions of gun violence have become so ubiquitous and commonplace as to lose all meaning – except to those that have to accept and confront their vicious reality. Rebel Ridge sidesteps the genre’s breezy gauche trigger(finger)s. At least, in terms of Terry’s choices. Tellingly it is always the cops who are ready to throw down with live rounds. This then comes to feel like the hot-tempered shortcut of the privileged and the racist. The unthinking choice.

Pierre is all contained anger and frustration. Through him it is self-evident that Terry is not allowed the luxury of expression. Almost always in the eye-line of a cop or two, Terry’s choices are forever underpinned by the grotesque reality than any irrational move can and will be taken as probable cause. Pierre’s Terry reacts, but does so behind gritted teeth. The business is going on internally and Saulnier’s camera registers this.

Acting as his own editor, Saulnier could have perhaps been a little crueler to his latest darling. Rebel Ridge does trundle a touch through it’s middle act, especially in contrast to the taught driving force behind its first hour. Another not insignificant complaint is the amount of important information delivered through the indistinct chatter of police radios. Its easy to find yourself needing to pause and rewind in order to remain up-to-speed (those who have no qualms putting on the subtitles might be well-served doing so). But even as Rebel Ridge sprawls it can’t hide a bristling anger than those given the privilege to protect and serve are among the most rightly feared in American society. In Saulnier’s film, a cold sweat prickles any time a police cruiser glides into frame or sits lurking in a side road.