I love a great cop thriller. Movies like Heat, Serpico and The Departed give us intense detectives forming that thin blue line between chaos and order, operating between gutters and government halls, bedrooms and bank vaults. We hope for good guys with bad attitudes and villains with shiny badges. Crooked judges and honorable thieves may both make appearances. Long-suffering romantic partners and neglected kids are the expected collateral damage.
The new Netflix cop picture The Rip starts with a bang when the captain of a narcotics division is gunned down after communicating with an undercover agent. The Rip reunites Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fellow narcs caught between bureaucratic ennui stagnating their boots-on-the-ground policing and the desire to solve their captain’s murder. Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon) is promoted to replace the fallen captain, taking command of the Miami-Dade Tactical Narcotics Team alongside his partner and second-in-command, Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck).
The team — including detectives Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Mike Ro (Steven Yeun) — conducts a raid on a trashy stash house in hostile territory. Inside, they discover over $20 million in cash, almost certainly belonging to dangerous cartel operators. Under Miami law, the narcotics team must count every dollar on-site before leaving the premises, trapping them in the location with the massive seizure — a “rip.”
The circumstances that paralyze the team are both procedural and ethical. If they follow protocol they’re sitting ducks. If they break protocol they have paths to survival, but what if everybody has different motivations, and what if somebody on the team is actually responsible for their beloved captain’s death?
Damon’s lieutenant asking Affleck’s sergeant, “Do you think I want to jack this rip?” is my favorite movie line reading of the new film year so far, and that’s the question viewers will ask of most characters in the film. Writer-director Joe Carnahan has fun flip-flopping Damon and Affleck for and against their familiar screen personas as every plot point turns twisty. One moment Damon’s lieutenant is the no-nonsense boy scout and Affleck’s sergeant is the good-hearted hothead, but in another moment the lieutenant seems conniving and blatantly dishonest. Affleck’s sergeant likewise never shows all of his cards and seems willing to undermine his leader and friend to do what he thinks is best for his career.
As the team works through the night counting the money, the clock is ticking. They receive ominous phone calls — seemingly from the cartel — warning that enforcers are coming to reclaim their fortune. The Rip has a strong cast, and the premise of heavily armed police trapped in a house with a fortune buried in its walls could read like a super-intense stage play, but Carnahan doesn’t let his pressure cooker explode. The personalities and motivations of team members are only barely hinted at through bursts of banter that amount to little more than cliché movie cop jargon. Detectives Baptiste and Salazar spend two-thirds of the movie counting the money, outside the main action. Salazar alludes to how much the cash might help with raising her daughter, but that’s hardly revelatory. What are Baptiste’s motivations? Detective Ro undergoes his own transformation over the course of the film, but it feels more like a clunky function of plot than a genuine and gripping character revelation.
The Rip’s cast is fully loaded and the film brings all the elements of an intense police drama, even with its misfires. Teyana Taylor just won a Golden Globe and I’ve been a fan of Steven Yeun since The Walking Dead. If you’re a Damon/Affleck fan and you love a cop thriller, The Rip should be on your winter weekend watch list.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.