‘The Rip’ Review
Always trying to reinvent his own approach to action, Joe Carnahan’s filmography feels distinct from one film to the next while still maintaining pulpy thrills that range from comedic to visceral. Going into a Carnahan film always feels safe, not because the movie is guaranteed to be good but because it generally twists familiar tropes through technically proficient filmmaking. Usually boasting a charismatic ensemble and willing to get a little rough with its characters and violence, there’s a simple pleasure at the foundation of every one of the director’s movies that can sometimes be surprisingly profound (The Grey) or gleefully over-the-top (Smokin’ Aces). There are myriad ways to cook an egg, and Carnahan has been successfully finding new approaches every time.
In his latest film, The Rip, Carnahan brings together Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for something a little grittier than his past work, walking a very fine line through the traditional dirty-cop narrative. Damon plays Lieutenant Dane Dumars, whose recent promotion and friendship with Detective Sergeant JD Byrne (Affleck) is strained after the death of fellow detective, Jackie Velez (Lina Esco). Members of the TNT (Tactical Narcotics Team) are thrown under investigation by Internal Affairs and the FBI as they suspect that Jackie’s death was at the hands of a cop. The feeling that no one will be caught for Jackie’s murder has the two on edge, but they continue with business as usual and follow a Crimestoppers tip of some serious money being stashed in a nearby house. What Dane, JD, and the rest of the TNT soon discover is that the “rip” is astronomically higher than they were led to believe, and tensions begin to escalate further as morality, duty, and financial burdens collide.
Cleverly, Carnahan’s screenplay, co-written by Michael McGrale and inspired by true events from one of Carnahan’s friends, shifts from a simple cashgrab and job gone wrong to a whodunit wrapped up in a siege film. The TNT’s initial task is to find money in the house, count it on site, and then seize it and return it to HQ. When the amount is significantly more than expected, it becomes a long night in a seemingly abandoned cul-de-sac where the only presence appears to be Dumars and his team, rounded out by detectives Byrne, Ro (Steven Yeun), Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), and Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno)—all of who are isolated to the house until the count is done. With debts piling up in their personal lives, from medical bills to childcare, the temptation to take a cut when no one would suspect it becomes an added layer of pressure.
The Rip’s siege film elements come into play when the darkness of the neighbourhood surrounding the house begins to feel like an ominous presence looming over the team. Whose money is this? What will they do if it’s stolen? Who called in the Crimestoppers tip? Is anyone counting this money dirty? The Rip isn’t exactly breaking new ground here, but the way it lets the tension mount makes for a compelling crime drama even if the action doesn’t quite pick up until the latter half of the film. The chasm between the salary of each officer and the money standing before them is impossible to ignore, but what makes The Rip interesting is trying to figure out the other motivations that might make a cop go dirty. Isolated to a single location, it plays a bit like Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire in that you just don’t know who to trust because you don’t know how much money it would take for someone to go over the edge. In some cases, perhaps it’s simply the job that has taken a toll on them.
Like Free Fire, The Rip also features a very capable ensemble, including extremely dependable actors in this genre, such as Kyle Chandler and Scott Adkins. No one is chewing scenery or being splashier in their presence, but Carnahan is aiming for a nice blend of verisimilitude and entertainment that every actor in this is able to effectively convey. It’s when the film tries to outline each character's morality that it’s a bit less graceful. JD is painstakingly portrayed as the moral center of the film, while other characters often have their essence distilled down to a single line. The film’s not coy about its stance on police either, even when it’s playing with the idea of dirty cops easily thriving within the system. A character refers to the police as the “sandbag between chaos and civilized society,” without much of a thought to whether that sandbag might be more porous than they believe. It’s not a surprising belief, but in a film so preoccupied with the idea of dirty cops, how can a system be considered important if it’s not perceived as flawed?
Carnahan’s bread-and-butter will always be his eye for action, and while The Rip does feature some visceral and burly sequences of tactical gunfights, it’s surprisingly more of a game of mental chess that provides the thrills. Guns are always present, but when no one wants to show their hand and no one knows how anyone will react, there’s an explosive quality to every pointed question and interrogation. It feels closer to a Western at times. Some of that falls apart toward the end, as the screenplay feels the need to explain everything so it makes sense before people start shooting each other, but the tension building up to it is, unsurprisingly, effective. The glaring problem is that Carnahan rarely writes a screenplay that contains subtlety or nuance without paying attention to it. Here is no different.
The Rip’s grey area leaves every action reverberating with intensity. Which makes it a shame that none of the performances carry that same ambiguity. Characters that the film wants you to believe lean one way are so obviously being positioned as red herrings, and it’s obvious not just because the screenplay points out their moral alignment so readily, but also because almost every actor is transparent in the role. A movie doesn’t need to be surprising to be satisfying. If you’re implying to an audience that something is meant to be read one way, and then the film needs to spend several minutes explaining why that is not the case to make a reveal work, is it really working? The answer is an easy no, and The Rip just falls apart once it starts letting the cat out of the bag.
With no real standout gunfights and no performances particularly grabbing any attention, it all falls back onto competent direction, which Carnahan delivers. The intensity that festers for most of The Rip is the kind of dependable, muscular filmmaking that keeps movies like Triple Frontier, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Land of Bad, and Triple 9 operating on a different level than other action films of their kind. They’re tactical, methodical, and well-oiled machines that provide their talent a canvas to prove their action prowess while giving action filmmakers room to create entertaining set pieces. The Rip is no different than those, and while it may not be the most effective at what it does, it delivers a sturdy enough spectacle that is slightly nerve-racking and mostly entertaining.
