'Rebel Ridge' Rips.
'Green Room' director Jeremy Saulnier's latest, a civil forfeiture-themed riff on 'First Blood,' might be his most satisfying to date.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
Rebel Ridge, the latest movie from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin/Green Room/Hold The Dark) is one of those movies you might want to pop a Xanax before you see. It drops you into an intense situation that doesn’t really let up until the credits roll, and even in an overtly pulpy thriller, there’s hardly a second of it that feels false or unearned.
At a time when action scenes have largely become dull, rote placeholders, Saulnier shoots what are very close to extended action setpieces, just not the manic pew-pewing kind that we’ve become used to. He’s brought tension back to the multiplex. Or at least, that’s something I could say if they’d actually play his movies at the multiplex.
After two festival darling, arthouse limited releases (Blue Ruin and Green Room), Rebel Ridge is Saulnier’s second Netflix release (after Hold the Dark). Having another Saulnier joint go straight to Netflix is bittersweet, in the sense that I can once again write about one of his movies that you can see right now, but also feels like a missed opportunity. This one especially seems like it had mainstream potential, probably Saulnier’s most accessible film so far.
Aaron Pierre plays Terry, a muscle-bound badass whose excessively calm manner positively screams “don’t mess with this guy.” Pierre is perfectly cast, not just because he can exude menace without saying a word, but also because Terry is basically Saulnier’s entire directing project in a nutshell: setting audience expectations early and then delaying gratification as long as possible until the inevitable violent crescendo. And the climactic moment always delivers.
Terry is new in the Saulnier oeuvre, however, in that he’s capable of becoming our instrument of movie vengeance without the orgy of violence that usually accompanies such. It’s not that I’m against orgies of movie violence (quite the opposite, actually), but through Terry, Saulnier explores the idea that audience gratification isn’t necessarily tied to violence specifically; it’s more about the powerful reassertion of control. And Aaron Pierre doesn’t need a gun or a sword to play that. (Just dreamy eyes and massive biceps).
Anyway, Terry is riding his bicycle through the countryside one day, listening to “metal mix” on his iPhone so loudly that he doesn’t hear the police car trying to pull him over. Which naturally makes an easy excuse for the cops to rough him up when they finally do manage to knock him off his bike and slap on the cuffs. The local deputies are played by David Denman, aka Pam’s husband on The Office, a guy who plays cops and military dudes so often that he’s like the Caucasian Michael Peña; and Emory Cohen, the now-grown teenager from Place Beyond the Pines, who always seems like he has a bit of a screw loose, like a dumber, more dangerous American Barry Keoghan. Together they make for ideal, semi-incompetent yet still menacing Keystone Cops, demanding to know why Terry was “fleeing” and confiscating his cash.
Terry, it turns out, has a lot of cash. He’s just sold his car (hence the bike) and cashed out his part in a restaurant business, and is on his way to bail a cousin out of jail. Time is of the essence, Terry goes onto explain, because his cousin has run afoul of a drug gang and likely won’t survive a night behind bars. Only, well, black guy with a lot of cash, a small town in the south, a Sheriff’s Department, you can probably see where this is going. Terry soon gets a crash course in our unfortunately very real Civil Asset Forfeiture laws, whereby the police can just confiscate any cash they suspect of being proceeds from illegal activity, whether or not the holder has actually been convicted or even charged with anything. Those police can then force the person to go through a laborious process to get the money back, and if it hasn’t been claimed by a certain date, the cops can just keep it for the department. It’s an incentive structure that you don’t have to have seen We Own This City to imagine how it might play out*.
Thus unstoppable force (Terry) meets immovable object (Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws, as represented by small-town Sheriff Sandy Burnne, played by Don Johnson). Johnson is another perfectly cast actor in Rebel Ridge, and like a literary foil for Pierre, does a brilliant job telegraphing that he’s an evil asshole even when he isn’t acting overtly evil, or even really unpleasant. He isn’t evil due to any particular malevolence, he just cares a lot more for his own needs than your humanity, which is somehow scarier.
Other players in this drama include Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), an assistant public defender who’s as disturbed to learn about her town’s corruption as Terry; Officer Sims (Zsane Jay, a new Deputy on the force just learning the beat); and Eliot (Steve Zissis), another lawyer caught up in a system he might not agree with, but has to try to work with anyway because that’s the hand he’s been dealt.
Saulnier being Saulnier, he doesn’t just make you wait for inevitable explosion of violence, he makes you wait for the inevitable explanation of which part of Terry’s history will make him especially adept at the violence. There’s a brilliantly conceived scene during which Officer Sims is researching Terry’s military record, which lists him as a “MCMAP” instructor. She’s using the station’s spotty internet to try to figure out what “McMap” is, while just outside, the two deputy goons are ordering Terry to the ground and it seems like he’s probably not going to comply. “Marine Corps Martial Arts,” she finally reads aloud, just as the situation goes sideways.
Yes, Terry is some kind of jiu-jitsu master, and if you saw Green Room you know how much Jeremy Saulnier likes his jiu-jitsu.