'Rebel Ridge' review: Jeremy Saulnier delivers a pressure cooker about small town corruption
Courtesy of Netflix
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier doesn't mince words when putting his stamp on what he sees as the skewed version of the American dream. In the opening sequence of “Rebel Ridge,” ex-Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre - an action star in the making) is chased down on his bike by a pair of racist cops who then illegally search and seize his belongings, including $10k cash to bail his cousin out of prison for possession of weed. It’s an image and story we’ve seen plastered on our televisions all too much in the last decade: a black man being harassed by law enforcement.
In the next scene, Terry walks into a local courthouse asking for assistance on how he can get his belongings back and post the bail for his cousin, but is quickly shown the door because the small town of Shelby Springs doesn’t have the manpower or resources to actually deal with the problems. Save for an empathetic court clerk played by AnnaSophia Robb, Terry’s efforts to execute his plans in a legal way are dead on arrival.
It’s an accurate portrait of backwoods, industrial America that Saulnier repurposes into a pressure cooker thriller about small town corruption and greed. We’ve seen this story before: a drifter wanders into a new place with big “this town ain’t big enough for the two of us” energy and immediately causes friction with those who run the joint. In this case, it’s Chief Sandy Burnne (an egomaniacal Don Jonnson) who has been trying to clean up his act after being on the wrong end of an accidental death lawsuit that put the town of Shelby Springs in hot water after the police department was hit with massive fines they couldn’t pay.
Terry doesn’t care about that, of course, he only wants to get his cousin out of jail before inmates figure out he snitched on a prominent drug kingpin, but, as we learned with John Wick, when you poke the bull, you surely get the horns. Saulnier holds his cards close to the vest on the unique set of skills Terry possesses and as the turf war escalates, it becomes evident this hulking figure is someone you don’t want to mess with. At one point, he gets tased, doesn’t even flinch, and then rips it out of his back.
Channeling the likes of young action heroes of the eighties, Pierre is a commanding screen presence. His performance is calm, calculated, and collected as he squares off against Johnson’s small town sheriff and his cronies, who, equal to his counterpart, is having a blast hamming it up as the gunslinging baddie eager to sick his redneck SWAT team the moment he feels threatened. It makes for some good banter and Saulnier’s script stays pretty tight even when it could have been more simplistic.
“Rebel Ridge” is filled with layers upon layers of backstory and exposition, and one of those involves the clerk Terry befriends early in the movie. We learn she lost her daughter in a heated custody battle because of her drug abuse and has been trying to turn her life around. The addition of this character certainly helps Terry have several come to Jesus moments about what he needs to accomplish in Shelby Springs, but it’s still an inclusion that adds some convolution to the story.
Shot beautifully by David Gallego, with spitfire editing by Saulnier himself, “Rebel Ridge” is certainly in the upper pantheon of the Netflix action vehicles. Unlike the brainless addition of something like “Red Notice,” at least “Rebel Ridge” has something to say baked underneath its wild shoot-outs and slick action sequences about how our country has essentially become a lawless version of itself and that maybe if we treated people with respect, empathy, and kindness, or, you know, funneled tax payers dollars into reputable community programs, society could be a more harmonious place. Ironic to pull all that from a movie that would have played gangbusters on TNT in the nineties.
Grade: B
REBEL RIDGE streams on Netflix, Friday September 6th
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