When they first landed thanks to Good Will Hunting, it seemed that childhood buddies turned Hollywood hot tickets Matt Damon and Ben Affleck we close to being inseparable. However, on closer inspection, despite their repeated antics on Jimmy Kimmel, that actually isn’t that true when it came to actual screen-time. Sure Kevin Smith got them together a couple of times and they shared poster space in both Air and The Last Duel, but seeing the boys as an actual double act has been rarer than you might think.
This is set to change thanks to Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, the latest entry in Netflix’s “why the fuck isn’t this in the cinema” season that takes the director’s obsession with grit, alpha males and cops teetering on the edge of corruption and give it an extra nail biting edge. Can one of the most elusive/famous double acts in film sink their teeth into a dangerous world where even your allies can become enemies if the dollar count is high enough – or does it put the Rip in rip-off?
If movies are to be believed, working in the Tactical Narcotics Team in Miami is as hazardous a job as deep sea welding without a wetsuit – if you’re not busy stopping the drug trade while trying to not piss off the cartels, the clean to dirty cop ratio is terrifyingly off. Take TNT team leader Captain Jackie Velez who seems to have been cornered by two mystery gunmen who are looking to donate some bullets to her panicked body; but before they manage to complete a shotgun powered coup de grace, she manages to get a hastily typed text off before her life ends in a cold blooded pull of the trigger.
In the aftermath, we find TNT getting grilled by Internal Affairs with typically hot headed results, but while the team are shaken at the death, on the surface they seem to be a tightly knit group. Now in charge is Lieutenant Dane Dumars, who presides over good friend Detective Sergeant JD Byrne and fellow detectives Ro, Baptiste and Salazar and at the end of their most recent shift he approaches them with a last minute Crimestopper tip. As the team wearily agree, they head over to the house in question and press the woman there, Desi, for information which eventually leads to quite an alarming find. Located in a fake wall in the attic isn’t stashed drugs or weapons, but fourteen buckets of Cartel money that add up to a staggering $20 million which immediately throws up a multitude of problems both moral and physical.
For a start, you wouldn’t expect the Cartel to suddenly throw their hands up and write off such an amount of money, but there’s also the problems within. Everyone has bills to pay and when it become apparent that some of the details behind that Crimestopper tip proves to be worryingly sketchy, soon paranoia and mistrust spreads through the group like a virus. Corruption? Snitches? Or just basic greed, who among the group can remember that they’re supposed to be the good guys when the temptation kicks in.
While Joe Carnahan seems to now mainly indulge in slick, glib, old school action thrillers such as Cop Shop and Smokin’ Aces, it’s worth remembering that the film that first got him noticed was the unfeasibly gritty Narc that gave us a look at police undercover work so grimy, you could taste it in the back of your throat. For the most part, that’s what he endeavors to bring to The Rip as the morality of the five cops who stumble across an insanely hefty find discover that locating such a gargantuan haul isn’t as straight forward as you’d think. As a result, Carnahan expertly turns the screws as he not only expertly explains the gonad-shrinking dangers of making such a find, but he soon lays out a tense stage for people’s fingers to eventually start pointing inward as more variables start to build.
At first, considering that we’re dealing with shifty cops and Cartel money, there’s a sense that Carnahan is trying to riff on the teeth grinding stress caused by Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, but when we discover that the entire cul-de-sac that the offending house sits in is creepily empty, we soon start to drift into the territory occupied by two very relevant John Carpenter movies. At first, that knot in your stomach tightens when you realise that the notion of cut off coppers preparing to face down an unseen foe starts to greatly resemble Assault On Precinct 13 (in fact, The Rip actually greatly improves on the so-so 2005 remake). However, once the fear and u certainty starts to cause TNT to start to doubt each other, we start to creep into territory usually owned by The Thing as trust becomes rarer than unicorn poop and Carnahan is well served by a cast that play that mounting stress so well.
Obviously, the draw here is the recoupling of Matt and Ben and the film wisely gives them character types to play to along with tough-guy beards so bristly, they could be used to scrub a chip-pan clean. Damon’s Dumars is naturally the stiller, more rational of the two while Affleck embodies the more rougher JD with his typical abundance of quirks and it’s genuinely fun to watch these two genuine old pals slowly start to doubt virtually every word each other is saying. The supporting cast is pretty stacked too, although you might feel that after her attention catching turn in One Battle After Another, Teyana Taylor is fairly wasted in a standard cop role. However, we’ve also got Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun on hand too; a rare, non martial arts role for Scott Adkins; former Supergirl Sasha Callie and veteren Kyle Chandler on hand to help crank those nerves as virtually revelation ends up suggesting that yet another member of the group could be dirtier than a mole’s living room.
However, as with most films that trade in paranoia, sometimes once you discover who is who and what is what, there’s a tendency for the film to fall apart in that final reel. While The Rip manages to follow up nearly two hours of butt clenching happenings with a string of twists and reveals that does justice to everything that comes before, there’s also the sense that the film nearly goes too far into a typical, Hollywood action climax with gun fights, car chases and final reckonings that conveniently take place with no witnesses. Maybe the powers that be felt that they needed to pay off all that build up with some standard action beats, but qhile they come dangerously close to prove to be fun enough to not completely overturn the apple cart in a spray of bullets.
At its best when it’s cast of characters don’t believe a word that trickles out of the mouths of people who are supposed to have their back, The Rip proves that the reliably solid Carnahan still has what it takes to get that pulse racing. But while some may complain that it ultimately goes for an easier ending than like something akin to Sicario, the rarer-than-you-think pairing of Affleck and Damon manages to keep all the wheels firmly on the road. Rip roaring thrills.
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