I see about fifty movies a year, which is a lot more than most people, but not nearly enough to have a firm grasp on what is happening in the art form. Take the writer/director Joe Carnahan. He has been writing and directing movies for nearly thirty years. “The Rip” a straight-to-Netflix crime thriller starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is only the second movie of his that I have seen. The first was a Liam Neeson 2011 vehicle called “The Grey”, in which he battles wolves in the tundra. I thought that movie’s plot was sharp and the action well-delivered, but didn’t bother to look up who had written or directed it. Turns out that Joe Carnahan did both. Then Joe Carnahan did ten movies between 2011 and 2026, the names of which I don’t recognize at all (Stretch, Boss Level, Copshop, Battle Ready etc.) Now, he did “The Rip”, which I mainly saw because it was the only movie released this January that, on paper at least, vaguely appealed to me.
How I heard about it is counterintuitive too. I didn’t see a trailer or billboard of the movie. Instead Matt Damon and Ben Affleck went onto Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some interesting things about using AI in the writing context. That podcast has episodes that are like 2h-3hrs long, but they will cut out standalone 10-15 minute portions if someone decides to say something particularly interesting. Here, Matt and Ben made the prescient observation that large language models, given their source materials and what they are being trained on, tend to have mediocre outputs. This makes sense because the vast amount of human writing is mediocre and that is what the LLM’s are trying to replicate. So, it is a useful tool, yes, but you can’t rely on it to churn out superior work. In many ways, it is not designed to do that.
“The Rip” is not a typical January movie. The plot is sharply written and the action well-delivered. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck are well cast. Indeed, this is the type of movie that Roger Ebert may have championed as underrated and worth seeing in the early-nineties like One False Move or Red Rock West. But it isn’t a big movie and there are already a lot of movies about cops and drugs. The Rip does not need to be seen in a movie theater and likely would not make money there. Instead, Netflix produced and put it out in January when everyone was staying home. I’m told that like 40 million people have watched it so far. That is a good thing. When One False Move and Red Rock West came out, they struggled to get a theatrical release and people mainly saw those movies interspersed by commercials on television. And really, they needed the help of movie critics championing them to get that far. So The Rip is a well earned success. Keep that in mind when people bemoan the streaming services. For a particular type of movie, it is the correct vehicle.
If it weren’t for the pedigree of its cast, it would feel much more like an independent film. A female cop, a member of a Rip team, has just been murdered. The Rip team is being questioned by the federal bureau of investigation because the feds suspect that the team is corrupt and one of them killed her. The team is headed by Matt Damon (Lieutenant), then Ben Affleck (Detective Sergeant), then Steven Yeun (Detective), Teyana Taylor (Detective) and Catalina Moreno Sandino (Detective). These are all Oscar nominees.
The Lieutenant gets a tip from the murdered cop that there is drug money in a safe house in the neighborhood. Why she is telling him this is not explained. The Lieutenant goes about organizing his crew in an outwardly suspicious manner. He tells all of them that the tip was from a crime hotline (it isn’t) and then tells each of them a different number as to the amount that he thinks will be found (he doesn’t actually know, maybe). Then they show up and the woman living in the house decides to let them in even though they don’t have a search warrant with them. It is hinted that she might be a snitch herself (but for the good guys). Then they find $20,000,000, which is much much more than any of them thought that they could possibly find. Then it is revealed that the safe house is located at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street of empty houses. The cartel owns the whole block. Nobody is getting in and out without somehow being involved in the plot.
This is a locked room mystery thriller. There are plenty of spoilers to give and I won’t be revealing any of them. The movie does an exceptional job of staying one step ahead of the audience while also not cheating. It is the test of the quality of the movie like this (we can call it the Knives Out test), if the audience can pause the action at a particular point near the end (a good time is right after they have all gotten into the DEA truck and are being transported to the drop point), think about what they have seen, and try to figure out what is going on before everything is revealed. If that is possible, but you also have not figured it out yet and need to think about it, it is a good movie you are watching.
I didn’t pause the movie at that time. I could have (thank you Netflix), but didn’t feel like it. The reveals were satisfying and besides a few action sequences that were kind of overkill, it ended well. I just have to say this: driving a car with your left hand on the steering wheel while shooting a machine gun one handed with your right hand outside the driver’s side window is just so enormously impractical and stupid. I don’t think it should have been an otherwise smartly written movie. But then again, I guess Ben Affleck looked cool doing it.
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