Don Johnson as Chief Sandy Burnne and Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond in Rebel Ridge.Allyson Riggs/Netflix/Netflix
Rebel Ridge
Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier
Starring Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson and AnnaSophia Robb
Classification N/A; 131 minutes
Streaming on Netflix starting Sept. 6
Critic’s Pick
The period that has separated the release of Jeremy Saulnier’s 2018 thriller Hold the Dark and his follow-up, this weekend’s explosive new drama Rebel Ridge, feels like a gulf of time in which the filmmaker’s own characters might thrive: dark, brutal eras in which hope is all but extinguished.
Yet just as there is an eventual kind of sour light at the end of his films’ tunnels – from Murder Party to Blue Ruin to Green Room – Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.
In its patience and power, Rebel Ridge stands as one of the most searing American thrillers of the year, all the more remarkable given that the writer-director has executed a kind of mid-career genre flip. Instead of doubling down on the bodily carnage of his earlier work, in which Neo-Nazis slice and dice rock musicians or cops get mowed down by a possibly possessed war veteran, Saulnier has shifted the pyrotechnics here to dialogue and character. There is plenty of violence this time around, but it is (mostly) contained to the visceral intensities of stare-downs, shifts in body language, and razor-wire-sharp repartee. And thanks to Saulnier and his fantastic cast’s ferocious energy, the results are just as incendiary as any firefight.
Too many movies on your to-watch list? Here are the best films of 2023
The film opens by introducing a fascinating, unorthodox hero in the hulking Terry (Aaron Pierre): we see him sweating, focused, heavy-metal clanging through his AirPods as he ferociously … pedals a bicycle down a sunny country road. Terry’s journey is quickly knocked off its axis, though, when he’s run off the road by two police officers straight out of crooked-southern-cop central casting, played with winking toxicity by Emory Cohen and David Denman.
It turns out that Terry is en route to the nearby town of Shelby Springs to bail out his cousin, who is being held on a drug charge and faces immediate retribution from a local gang. But that doesn’t stop the cops from unjustly seizing Terry’s cash, citing some remarkably fuzzy real-life civil-asset forfeiture law that should incite rage among moviegoers. The robbery-in-all-but-name then sets off a chain of events that will eventually make the local police chief Sandy (Don Johnson) rue the day his officers ever crossed paths with this bicycle-riding stranger.
Pierre’s simmering performance is made all the more effective when he gets to bounce off the extremely punch-able Johnson.Allyson Riggs/Netflix/Netflix
Taking its cues from the likes of First Blood and Walking Tall – films in which one good man is forced to go up against an army of small-town corruption – Saulnier crafts a dynamic series of stand-offs, accented by moody conspiratorial edges made all the more frightening by the fact that he isn’t stretching the truth all that much. Although the last mile of the story – which pairs Terry too closely with a legal clerk (AnnaSophia Robb) with a troubled past while also shoe-horning in a subplot about a local judge (James Cromwell) – slows the momentum slightly, this is as fiery an indictment of American darkness as Saulnier has ever made.
But most of all, the filmmaker has built a true star vehicle from scratch for Pierre. The British actor, who made a massive impression in Clement Virgo’s 2022 Canadian drama Brother, is perfect as Terry, a slow boil in human form. There is one moment in particular – in which Terry’s very particular set of skills are slowly revealed to both Sandy and the audience – that rests entirely on Pierre’s sturdy shoulders. And the actor pulls off the trick with remarkable, almost frightening ease.
Pierre’s simmering performance is made all the more effective when he gets to bounce off the extremely punch-able Johnson. Neatly curdling his Miami Cop and Nash Bridges persona over the past decade in such projects as HBO’s Watchmen and Dragged Across Concrete, Johnson has now perfected the art of playing the worst kind of power-drunk authority figure. When his contemptible villain is paired off against Terry, even the most die-hard #BlueLivesMatter advocate will be rooting against the system.
The dramatic fireworks are almost enough to carry you through however many years it might take until Saulnier’s next film arrives.