Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rebel Ridge’ on Netflix, a Riveting Neo-Western from Director Extraordinaire Jeremy Saulnier

Rebel Ridge (now on Netflix) may not seem like An Event, but trust me, it is. It’s the latest film from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, of Green Room and Blue Ruin fame, and if you’re not aware, those two films are upper-tier thrillers, maybe the best genre films of the last decade. We’ve survived six empty years since Saulnier’s previous film – another Netflix exclusive, the rock-solid Hold the Dark – and he returns to the cinema fray after helming a couple episodes of True Detective. This one forefronts star-in-the-making Aaron Pierre, who replaced John Boyega after he departed the production, playing a not-to-be-underestimated mysterious drifter who finds himself trapped in a modern Deep South Western. The result is exhilarating.

REBEL RIDGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Over a black screen, we hear THE definitive Iron Maiden banger, “The Number of the Beast.” The implication? Besides hey, awesome movie pending, of course? Terry Richmond (Pierre) is entering Hell. Hell, or Incredibly Rural Louisiana, if you want to split hairs. With his earbuds in, he doesn’t hear the cop pull up behind him as he pedals up the road on his bike. The cruiser taps Terry’s back tire and sends him skidding on his elbows. Seems excessive. Another cruiser pulls up and you’ve got yourself some OPTICS: Black man on the ground. Two white cops, hands hovering over holsters. And, not pictured but absolutely present, some seriously hard pipe-hitting tension.

Terry has a backpack. And in that backpack is a plastic bag. And in that plastic bag is 30-odd thousand dollars in cash. Shady? Eh. You look into Terry’s piercingly earnest eyes and tell me he’s lying when he says $10k is for bailing his cousin out of jail and the rest is for a truck he wants to buy so he can work hauling boats. Can’t do it. The guy’s true f—ing north. It ain’t illegal to carry around a lot of cash. The cops – Steve Lann (Emory Cohen) and Evan Marston (David Denman) – don’t care. They take the cash. Totally legal. Could be drug money. “Civil asset forfeiture,” they say. And thus begins Terry’s foray into infuriatingly corrupt American institutions.

Not that this film is about navigating the bureaucracy. Terry’s too huge and cut and too much of a speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-grudge type to be the protagonist of a talky drama. He wants his money back so he calmly walks into the Shelby Springs cop shop and tries to file a report for theft, citing Officer Lann as the suspect. He knows he’s opening a can of worms, but he can handle himself and think on his feet, and soon enough we learn that he’s an ex-Marine from the MCMAP program. Look it up – the cops in this movie had to.

Some of the worms in this can? Well, there’s tobacco-spittin’, arrogant-grinnin’ police Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) as an antagonist, court clerk Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb) as an ally and where does the local judge (James Cromwell) land? Not saying. It’s complicated, anyway. But you just know this shit is going to get thick real quick.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Plenty of well-justified comparisons to First Blood here, and the Clint Eastwood Westerns that were inspired by Kurosawa’s samurai stories. 

Performance Worth Watching: Have you ever watched a movie fronted by an absolute laser of a human being? That’s Pierre in Rebel Ridge. And Johnson is his perfect foil, a love-to-hate-him smirking sleaze-shark who absolutely deserves to be scorched by that laser.

Memorable Dialogue: You want the badass exchange?

Summer: What about taking fuel away from the fire?

Terry: It’s different now.

Summer: How so?

Terry: We’re the fire.

Or do you want the withering one-liner?

Terry: It’s gotten out of hand. It’s a real soup sandwich.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Saulnier is a master craftsman, integrating technically precise, visceral action into a deliciously knotty story that wrestles with institutional rot in American policing. Rebel Ridge goes deep into the corruption swamp, and it’s infuriatingly plausible within existing civil asset forfeiture laws, which strike me as being words synonymous with “legal stealing.” (In a nutshell, cops only need suspicion, not proof, to seize assets.) But this is no message movie – rather, its primary currency is suspense, which Saulnier Silly-Putty stretches over the course of two-plus taut hours, the score pumping beneath a series of unexpected dramatic developments like an accelerated heartbeat. Saulnier directs in a manner that forces you to sit up and pay attention. I was riveted.

Pierre couldn’t be more tonally on-point with Saulnier’s intent to invoke memorable genre work working forward from Yojimbo. The actor’s eyes reflect a character of high intelligence, who knows he can use his physical acumen to improv his way into and out of intense scrapes. Why is he that way? Don’t ask, bro. The less we know, the more surprising the guy is. We know, we just know he’s capable of some shit – it’s all there in his aura, his presence – but experiencing precisely how he executes on the fly is the film’s greatest thrill. The subtext of watching a guy like Terry work? Don’t make assumptions about anybody. They just might surpass them, in one direction or the other.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Saulnier is a filmmaker firmly in control of his work. There are no soup sandwiches in his filmography.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.