‘The Rip’ Review – Joe Carnahan’s Slick, Muscular Thriller Is Old-Fashioned Fun

Netflix has several bad ideas, but giving Joe Carnahan $100,000,000 is a pretty good one. That was reportedly the budget of his new thriller The Rip, though it’s difficult to say how accurate that is (or, indeed, how much of that money was spent on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck). Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter, since it was still more money than he’s used to as a sturdy genre hand, and he’s put it to good use making a sharp, muscular, old-fashioned crime thriller of a type you rarely get these days. And that’s to be appreciated in my book.

The Rip is the quintessential streaming movie, in that it used to be the quintessential Saturday night rental, a solid, comfortably familiar genre picture by a set-’em-up-and-knock-’em-down director and starring two recognisable household names. It has no arty aspirations or trendy flourishes. It’s just a lean, mean Miami cops and robbers movie, surprisingly smart in its structuring and sophisticated in its performances, especially those of its co-leads, but ultimately here to kick down a few doors, justify a few shootouts, and make off with the haul, which thanks to Damon and Affleck’s Artists Equity profit-sharing rule will be distributed among the entire cast and crew.

The premise is simple enough in its broad strokes but much more complex in execution. Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Damon) is the newly promoted head of a Miami PD squad dubbed TNT, or Tactical Narcotics Team, which is incidentally the name of the team that Mike Lowry and Marcus Burnett are a part of in the Bad Boys movies. The squad’s under all kinds of scrutiny since another specialised department has recently been axed due to rampant corruption, so Internal Affairs and the FBI – here represented almost exclusively by Scott Adkins (Diablo), who regrettably doesn’t roundhouse kick anyone – are sniffing around all over the place. This situation is worsened by the recent murder of TNT’s former captain, Jackie Velez (Lina Esco).

J.D. (Affleck) is a member of the TNT squad, and also happens to be Jackie’s lover, Scott Adkins’s brother, and Dane’s best friend, which helps to leverage the considerable on-screen chemistry that Affleck and Damon have nurtured over the decades. The rest of the team comprises Mike Ro (Steven Yeun, Beef), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor, All’s Fair), and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ballerina), a pleasantly cosmopolitan crew of rebels who, thanks to a tip-off, find themselves in a quiet suburb after hours to retrieve what they believe to be a fairly standard amount of stashed cartel money. But the house – occupied only by a woman named Desi (Sasha Calle, The Flash) – contains far more than a standard amount. There is over $20,000,000 stashed in the attic.

That amount of money causes considerable problems. Where did the tip come from? Who knows about it? Who might try to snatch it? And what does the promise of financial freedom do to a team that the script – by Carnahan and Michael McGrale – makes sure we understand is struggling for overtime hours and has their share of personal problems? This, I think, is where The Rip is at its best, since it’s clear that something more is going on than meets the eye, but it’s deliberately cagey about who knows what. Tension builds pretty organically as it becomes obvious that someone is on their way to make a play for the dough, and it becomes harder and harder to know who to trust.

Damon and Affleck help with this, since they’re proper actors, not necessarily action stars. There’s little to no depth in the script beyond some allusions to personal trauma – J.D. is reeling from Jackie’s death, and Dane is adrift after the loss of his son and the breakdown of his marriage – but the performers sell it nonetheless, with J.D. bristling with irritation and Dane feeling convincingly haunted. The supporting cast is solid too, with each team member standing out despite having nothing of individual importance to do, and Sasha Calle lends a lot of clammy humanity to a civilian caught in the crossfire.

Carnahan knows what to do with this kind of material. The suspense is effectively created and maintained, and the payoff, which comes in a flurry of car chases, fistfights, and bullets, is worth the wait. There’s even a nattily lit and staged sequence in the back of a DEA BearCat that’s halfway between a Mexican stand-off and an Agatha Christie parlour reveal. That’s another moment that only works because there are real actors at work here, taking the macho pulp as seriously as they can. You’ve seen a lot of movies like The Rip, but I unashamedly loved it, at least in part because you sometimes think you might not see another. If Netflix is going to make a habit of throwing cash at B-movie filmmakers, I’m all for it.