Rebel Ridge plots about ex-US Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), who’s on his way to bail his cousin out for the weirdest of arrests, only to be chased by a cop car, and sensibly himself gets mugged of the 36 000$ he was carrying, under the misguided understanding of ‘legal asset forfeiture’ or something like. After Richmond tries reporting the crime, he runs up against the villain of the piece: police chief Sandy Burnne, (the always awesome Don Johnson), setting off a quite outrageous and comically as well as violently entertaining encounter between the two.
You know what they say, right? You better catch the K if you don't like what I'm about to say. I won't do that with you guys because, as you can probably imagine, the Rebel Ridge doesn't do any of that as far as I'm concerned. It is not a movie about people. When the police and the army face off, it's like a social fantasy in which those in power get to topple an order and create a new one. The most romantic of the two is always going to be the latter since it’s unbothered with policing the people from its own country. The narrative does an excellent job of explaining American patriotism. The events between Terry and Chief Burnne together describe the failure of conflict resolution as you can see. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that none of them are willing to make any compromises whether it be moral or financial. Due to their unwillingness, they engage in a duel in which Terry demonstrates his sporting prowess and Burnne demonstrates some of his inherent tactical skills. However, the majority of the film focuses on two men staring into each other's eyes while waiting for the other to give in to their demands and preparing for a fight. So, yes, this is more of a contemporary western than, say, The Wire with its Dickensian sensibility. It never pretends to be anything else, in my opinion. Just that, a typical Jeremy Saulnier’s movie, In Rebel Ridge there is a willingness to go where other action movies do not which undermines its message and I’m not so certain that the undercurrent of systemic oppression and ethnic animosity really helps the film as it’s half in real world and half in Sam Peckinpah’s world. The two hours are well worth it just for the action scenes. Go watch Rebel Ridge if you really want to see a man take out an entire squad of Armed Professionals with smoke grenades. What the fuck is wrong then? Why do I still haven't fallen in love with a Jeremy Sauliner movie? I dont know. The or the moral outsider washes an entire town full of corrupt cops and rescues the damaged girl cliche seems to me as I’ve said, the kind of annotation that twelve years old me would have devised out of a karate movie. It is very straightforward. Adults are not cartoonish silhouettes with rounded holes inside like that. They lack the cuts and rough edges of the protagonists and antagonists of Rebel Ridge. These are videos of the good and the bad. I'm a huge fan of Jeremy Sauliner, but the previous screenplay he wrote was already in more difficult parts territory. I mean, where is the soldier who stabbed Fox, a member of his own platoon? Where is the shattered man that longs for genocide? The social climate has changed a lot over the past few years, making it probably much harder to make a film with dark storylines or complicated ethics now. However, this is not the answer to the problem. It’s true that Rebel Ridge works but it does not equal to more than the parts of the film.
I’m being overly critical here, but Rebel Ridge is okay, it’s just fine. In general, as with all of Reid's films, the execution is spectacular, and it's cheap to make you feel uncomfortable. Where I wasn’t pleased, however, was with the absence of cuts politically since Jeremy Saulnier is not the kind of a director who polarises the issues he films. He likes capturing men fighting at the dismantled time continuum. Well, there is something in Rebel Ridge, but not that much. There are reasons for Terry Richmond to not feel it is necessary to build a world.