REBEL RIDGE - Mark Reviews Movies

Rebel Ridge, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

Some will know about civil forfeiture before watching Rebel Ridge, a tightly constructed mystery and strongly executed thriller from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier. For the rest, the film offers a crash course in the technically legal but dubious process of law enforcement seizing property from people—without the requirement of charging an individual with a crime. The film's a stealthy sort of public service announcement, but it doesn't let that get in the way of watching a one-man army provide his own crash course in justice upon a deeply corrupt police department in a small town.

Our hero is Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), an outsider to this seemingly sleepy locale in Louisiana, and the opening scene, which is harrowing while also quickly educating us about the questionable practice of asset forfeiture, shows what the local cops think of outsiders. Terry, a Black man, is minding his own business, riding his bicycle down the road into this town, when a police car starts swerving behind him. He doesn't notice, until the squad vehicle clips the rear tire of his bike, sending him tumbling to the ground.

The rest of the scene has a pair of white cops, Marston (David Denman) and Lann (Emory Cohen), threatening a cooperating Terry with a taser, handcuffing him, searching his pockets and backpack, and shoving him into the backseat of one of the squad cars. It's obvious Terry hasn't done anything wrong, and no matter how polite and accommodating he is with the two cops, they keep pushing until they find a bag filled with $30,000 in cash.

It's a lot of money for someone to have on him, obviously, but not illegal. Terry can account for it all—with receipts and the names of other people who can vouch for the money's origin—as well as what he plans to do with it. A third of it is going to bail for his cousin, who's in the local jail on misdemeanor drug charges, and the rest will pay for a truck so that Terry and his cousin can start doing some manual labor together.

The cops don't arrest Terry and have no plans of charging him with anything, but they take the cash anyway, providing the thin justification that they "suspect" it might have something to do with illegal drugs. That's all they need to confiscate the money, leaving Terry bruised, cut, and without the one thing he needs to get his cousin out of trouble. Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), an assistant at the municipal court in town, confirms all of that to Terry, who tells her why it's so important he pay the cousin's bail. Basically, the cousin's life depends on it in a very tangible way.

At his best, Saulnier is a filmmaker who doesn't mess around or waste time with the unessential things. Even if some of the later developments here—which have Terry and Summer digging into how the town's cops get away with what they do without most noticing—feel more routine than everything surrounding them, it's all part of the bigger picture.

After all, corruption isn't just a matter of bad people abusing power out in the open. It happens over time and behind the scenes in increments, and left to fester, it starts to look a lot like the ways of this town, where the directly corrupt people now have too much power for anyone to stop it, the people who know about it and could do something just want to look away, and those folks who don't know benefit just enough not to ask any questions.

The backdrop here is believable, especially with this cast—including Don Johnson, James Cromwell, and the assorted actors playing the cops—inhabiting roles of various degrees of complicity in the corruption. More importantly for the plot, the premise is more than enough to make us root for Terry, played by Pierre with grit and the charm of a straight shooter—even if, quite refreshingly for a film with this much action in it, his character only picks up firearms to eliminate any threat they might pose. He's an ordinary guy who also happens to be a Marine veteran with a specific speciality.

No one knows about it, since the skillset is buried within the letters of one of the military branch's many acronyms. Terry tried to keep the money by telling it straight to the cops, tries to retrieve by filing a police report against the cops, and can tell Burnne (Johnson), the chief, is the kind of man who would negotiate off-the-record just by looking at and listening to him for a bit. That the police chief breaks his word and their agreement, though, leaves Terry with no other option than to show him what that acronym means.

The result is a series of smartly staged fights, showdowns, standoffs, chases, and shootouts. Again, that last one is with the clever and pointed caveat that our hero refuses to hold, let alone shoot, any weapon with a lethal round in it. If the material about asset forfeiture is right in front of us as a key component of the plot, the choice about firearms seems like a subtle one on the part of Saulnier, who definitely hasn't shied away from gun violence and its consequences in his previous films.

Indeed, it escalates the stakes for Terry here, which are already high as he directly confronts the local cops, takes responsibility for those actions, and, even so, finds himself buried deeper in the mire of this corruption. The mystery and action unfold, but Saulnier doesn't sacrifice developing these characters—especially Terry, who always says what he wants in so many words, and Summer, who has some secrets of her own and a lot to lose by doing the right thing—in doing so. They're about as sturdy as the action, which is saying something.

Rebel Ridge serves as a rousing actioner, a conspiracy-laced mystery, and, as unlikely as it may seem, a subversive lesson in civics. It's an impressive, agile bit of filmmaking.

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