Rebel Ridge opens with a Black man, Terry Richmond (played by Aaron Pierre of The Underground Railroad and Old), riding a bicycle down a backcountry road in rural Louisiana. He’s clearly a tough guy, with tattoos on his bulging biceps, cutoff camo shorts, and Iron Maiden blasting on his headphones. But then he encounters the one thing that can rattle any Black man: the police pull him over.
It turns out Terry is carrying $36,000 stuffed into a Chinese takeout bag, which he says he needs to bail out his cousin from the local jail. The police officers suspect it’s drug money and proceed to seize the cash.
They’re typical “bad apple” cops – hostile, aggressive, and disrespectful. But Terry is the opposite. He’s preternaturally calm and cooperative, doing everything an unarmed Black man is expected to do when in police custody. He’s obviously military trained. It’s not long before we learn Terry is an ex-Marine with, let’s say, a very particular set of skills, and the local police have made a serious error in messing with him.
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin and Green Room) starts with a premise similar to First Blood, in which a small-town sheriff picks a fight with a homeless veteran. Except Terry Richmond is no John Rambo. Far from a traumatized killing machine, Terry is master of self-control and restraint — a perfect foil for the redneck police who jump straight to handcuffs and tasers, with barely a second thought before leveling up to lethal force. In Aaron Pierre’s intense and internal performance, you can see Terry processing, thinking through the options and consequences. He’s always negotiating with his opponents, deescalating whenever possible.
Terry is laser focused on his objective: bail his cousin out before he is transferred to the state prison where his life will be in danger of gang retaliation. But the local police chief keeps giving him the runaround. Terry starts digging around with the help of a young, idealistic law clerk (AnnaSophia Robb) and uncovers a conspiracy — all while the clock is ticking in the race to save Terry’s cousin. As he attempts to find a legal means of recovering his seized bail money Terry feels increasingly jerked around, and correspondingly angry.
Action-movie fans will be primed to expect an explosion of violence, but Rebel Ridge is often more conspiracy thriller than action movie. Don’t get me wrong: there was enough action to keep my pulse up from the opening scene. But overall Rebel Ridge is closer to 2007’s Michael Clayton than to First Blood. Really it’s a kind of Western in the classic mode of Bad Day at Black Rock, except this hero is anything but a gunslinger.
Terry disarms and disassembles more firearms than anyone shoots in this movie – which is precisely what makes him such a badass action hero. He has the cool confidence and casual competence of John Wick without the guns. As much as I enjoy action movies, I often get turned off by any hint of gun fetish. It’s not as much fun to watch people get shot anymore, with almost daily headlines of real-life mass shootings.
The most intense scenes involve Terry and the Police Chief literally staring each other down. It’s “a pissing contest,” as the Chief says. With Terry’s background a mystery and the police clearly hiding something, these scenes play out like poker games. The cops think they have a winning hand, but Terry isn’t giving anything away. Every move he makes is deliberate, conceding what he needs given the cards he was dealt. But the police keep forcing Terry to raise the bet.
With an unarmed Black man facing off against the police, Rebel Ridge takes place in a context where race is impossible to ignore. The film forces us to wonder, “If this guy can use restraint and non-lethal force to overcome the cops, why can’t police do the same with real-life suspects?” At the same time, there is less direct racial commentary than this framing would suggest. The chief, played by Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame, comes off as racist, perhaps because Johnson has recently played a more obviously racist cop in HBO’s Watchmen TV series, not to mention an antebellum plantation owner in Django Unchained, and an entitled bigot in Knives Out. But you could replace Pierre with a Jeremy Allen White (or some other White dude) and keep the entire plot and most of the dialogue, too.
As much fun as it is to watch an unarmed Marine Corps jiu jitsu master kick prejudiced cop ass with his bare hands, it is just as thrilling to watch Saulnier’s screenplay demolish civil asset forfeiture. I learned more from this action movie than Vox Explained videos. The cops in this movie are corrupt, but the procedures they use to enrich themselves are perfectly legal. People of color probably suffer the most from these easily abused laws, but this is a systemic issue that can affect anyone of any race, so long as good people choose to look the other way.
Rebel Ridge is the rare Netflix original film that’s worth your full attention. As genre films go, it’s a little long, and the tension sags slightly during the mystery investigation scenes in the second act, but I was never bored. I’d love to see a sequel with the further adventures of Terry Richmond, nonlethal badass.
