Written and Directed by Jeremy Saulnier | 131 min | ▲▲▲△△| Netflix
When Saulnier emerged on the American indie filmmaking scene with Blue Ruin and Green Room, alongside filmmakers like Taylor Sheridan and Dan Gilroy he seemed like a natural to carry that great tradition of Hollywood thrillers into the future.
He stumbled slightly with Hold The Dark, but is now back with a movie that’s a step in the right direction, if not quite to the standard of those first two. It’s just as much a drama as it is a thriller, perhaps to a fault. I’ve heard the film compared favourably to one of Sylvester Stallone’s best films, First Blood, and though we get some surface similarities Rebel Ridge feels a lot more like the first season of the Amazon Prime show, Reacher, though with a whole bunch less killing.
It roars on screen with Iron Maiden’s “Number Of The Beast” dialled up to 10, a great start. Former military man Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, so good in Brother) is cycling across a rural Louisiana county when he’s run off the road by a couple redneck cops. He’s searched and has a big wad of cash on him, which he says he’s going to use to pay bail for his cousin. All the cops need to seize that cash is suspicion of wrongdoing, so they take it. But Terry’s not going to let that stand. He goes back to the source for more support, makes tracks for the county courthouse and makes friends with a clerk there, Summer (AnnaSophia Robb). This while the local sheriff (Don Johnson) continues to make life difficult for him the longer he’s hanging around town.
And so it goes, the picture fuelled by a terrifically moody score and editing slowly increasing tension. Terry’s a smart guy, and he clearly has a lot of special skills, and with Summer digging into longstanding police corruption, you really get a sense this place is gonna blow at any moment.
But it really takes its time. What the law enforcement does to Terry feels like an indictment of everything that’s wrong with the unchecked power that many cops get to wield, and by the middle of the second act Terry’s got plenty of motivation to turn this picture into a full on revenge movie. If anything he’s too restrained, and so is the movie around him.
Saulnier does a great job providing the legal and judicial details Terry is up against while turning the screws, but the bursts of violence, entirely welcome when they arrive, come too infrequently. There was absolutely no need for Rebel Ridge to be more than two hours long — a tighter script and we could’ve had a killer hour and 40 minute thrill ride. That film is still here, in its bones, but we get a little too much procedure and too little payback.
Still, this is very much worth sitting through, especially for the cool, calm, and collected performance from Aaron Pierre. I gather he took the role over from John Boyega, who bailed at the 11th hour, and if there’s any justice this picture will make Pierre, another Brit, a serious player for leading roles in action cinema or whatever he wants to do next in Hollywood.
