Cycling swiftly down a deserted stretch of Louisiana highway, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is making good time en route to the small town of Silver Springs, where he’s fixing to bail his cousin Mike out of jail. His massive legs pistoning in time to Iron Maiden’s blistering “The Number of the Beast”—and with $30,000 in cash burning a hole in his pocket—he cuts a striking figure against the landscape … at least until he’s rear-ended and dragged across concrete.
It’s a hit-and-run, but the perpetrators have no reason to flee the scene: They’re cops, and they’ve targeted Terry on purpose. He’s forced to lie face down and keep quiet while they confiscate the bail money. The search is obviously illegal—but it’s not like it matters. Rather, these jacked-up bullies are operating with the impunity of men who’ve internalized the fact that they’ll never truly be held accountable. “Did you tase him?” sneers one tormentor. He looks at Terry, spread-eagled and helpless—a mountain of a man cut down to size. “It’s not too late,” he adds.
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The image of a Black man being pursued, detained, and humiliated by white police officers carries a potent charge, and Jeremy Saulnier’s new film, Rebel Ridge—which premieres this week on Netflix and marks the director’s long-overdue return to feature filmmaking after six years in development hell and the prestige TV wilderness—feels fully plugged into the contemporary zeitgeist. Such resonance is traditionally part of Saulnier’s MO. In his previous A-plus B movies Blue Ruin and Green Room, the filmmaker cleverly explored and exploited various perpetually percolating national anxieties about violence, money, and political polarization. (The blunt and strangely prescient thrust of the gory punks-versus-skinheads smackdown Green Room, which came out two years before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, can be summed up in the Dead Kennedys cover played by its guitar-slinging heroes: “Nazi Punks f*ck Off.”) 2018’s psychological horror exercise Hold the Dark was a well-made misfire, but Saulnier is back in strapping form with Rebel Ridge, which laces a pulpy narrative with fine-grained observations about racial profiling. It’s two hours long, but it moves like a shot, functioning efficiently on multiple levels without breaking a sweat.
Predictability is the basic syntax of genre cinema, and Saulnier speaks the language with a terse, stripped-down eloquence. Obviously, Terry is being railroaded, and just as obviously, he’s holding something back while deferring to his tormentors; the scene where the full scope of his Marine service is revealed to the bad guys via a hastily arranged Wikipedia search is pricelessly funny. Suffice it to say that our man has a special set of skills and that, if you push him far enough, he’ll use them.
Crucially, Rebel Ridge doesn’t rush things: By structuring the narrative as a slow burn and keeping the action restricted to Silver Springs, Saulnier is able to make the script’s inventory of clichés work in his favor, starting with Terry’s tender but platonic team-up with Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a sympathetic, resourceful court clerk tilting against some institutional windmills of her own. Their scenes together are punctuated by some nicely serrated dialogue: “Isn’t that what nights do?” cracks Terry when his new pal says she’s got a feeling that things are about to get dark. Her theory—and it’s a good one—is that Terry’s close encounter with the cops is connected to both his cousin’s incarceration and a larger conspiracy involving the local police department’s compulsive habit of seizing assets from everybody they can, an off-the-books form of fundraising that also implicates several other town power brokers on the side.
In interviews, Saulnier has name-checked Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 survivalist classic, First Blood, which similarly pitted a one-man wrecking crew against a phalanx of good old boys in blue. A key cinematic text of the Reagan era, First Blood is both smarter and more politically ambivalent than it had any right to be; it’s easy to forget that before Sylvester Stallone let the franchise descend into a vortex of Roman-numeraled sequels and brazenly brainless self-parody, John Rambo was a genuinely complex character, a psychologically damaged Vietnam vet forced to relive his overseas experiences at home. Rebel Ridge is less concerned with questions of trauma than its predecessor, focusing instead on a very 21st-century form of corporate malfeasance. “I had to zig or zag away from First Blood or lean into that trope for fun as I became more aware,” Saulnier told The Hollywood Reporter. “By the time I was pitching it, it was First Blood meets Michael Clayton.”
That’s a mash-up that’s never really been attempted before, and while Rebel Ridge is impressively seamless as a piece of fine-grained pulp fiction, it also evokes its maker’s considerable behind-the-scenes struggles on a subtextual level. As much as Terry has been constructed as a sturdy, noble B-movie archetype—a two-fisted crusader indebted to Rambo as well as to Tom Laughlin’s lumbering, anti-authoritarian hapkido master, Billy Jack—he’s also legible as a stand-in for a filmmaker tired of banging his head against an intractable infrastructure. After writing the script in 2019, Saulnier was forced to delay shooting for nearly two years due to COVID. Then, in 2021, the project nearly fell apart altogether after the departure of its original star, John Boyega, who cited “family reasons” for walking shortly after shooting got underway. Within days, rumors began circulating online that the split was not amicable, and that the actor had bailed due to dissatisfaction with the script and the production. Whatever the actual truth, Saulnier needed to find a new lead, and fast.
With all respect to Boyega—a likable and charismatic screen presence who earned his Star Wars gig on the strength of his superlative turn as a London gang member in Attack the Block—his exit was ultimately a blessing in disguise. As much as Rebel Ridge is a showcase for Saulnier’s rock-solid craftsmanship, it’s also an ideal role for Pierre, who’s got the tautly muscled bulk and bruising charisma of an honest-to-god action movie star. (It helps that he’s roughly the same dimensions as a Mid-Sized Sedan.) Playing a runaway enslaved person in Barry Jenkins’s underrated magical-realist 19th-century period piece, The Underground Railroad, the London-born actor gazed out at the world around him with a mixture of stoicism and horror. Here, he narrows his wide, luminous hazel eyes to pinpoints of quiet fury. Shortly after Terry’s initial encounter with the cops, there’s a great kinetic set piece in which he tries to catch up to a speeding prison transport on his motorcycle to pass on a warning to Mike (CJ LeBlanc). When he somehow manages to fist-bump his cousin through the bus window at 80 miles per hour, it’s rousing and emotional, a small gesture of solidarity presented as a feat of superhuman exertion.
There’s a second first-rate performance worth praising in Rebel Ridge, though, and it belongs to Don Johnson as Terry’s nemesis, Sandy Burnne, a corrupt police chief determined to humble the stubborn interloper by any means necessary. In recent years, Johnson has transformed himself from an I-Love-the-’80s relic into a sly, entertainingly hateful character actor specializing in racist authority figures, from the spectacularly mustachioed plantation owner in Django Unchained to the sad*stic prison warden of S. Craig Zahler’s brutal prison movie riff Brawl in Cell Block 99. (He also played a tacitly obnoxious LAPD pencil pusher in Zahler’s fascinating, critically divisive follow-up, Dragged Across Concrete.) He plays Burnne as a relaxed, petty despot who’s within a hair’s breadth of being exactly as powerful as he thinks he is. The pleasure is in watching him flail around in the nearly imperceptible gap between all of his smirking tough talk and the tight-lipped moments of realization that he’s been outmatched.
That a movie as accomplished and enjoyable as Rebel Ridge is bypassing theaters for a streaming platform is at once a legitimate shame and business as usual. A Zen riddle: What if a filmmaker makes a crowd-pleaser without a crowd? Fifteen years ago, before producers and distributors alike signed off on the idea that movies were “content,” we had wonderful late-summer multiplex sleepers like A Perfect Getaway—fun, self-contained jaunts that gratefully bypassed the heaviness of event films in favor of more welterweight exhilaration. Rebel Ridge is a movie made in that honorable tradition. Here’s hoping it’s one of the lucky few to get the Netflix boost rather than being squandered on the altar of algorithms.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
