In the Flesh: Rebel Ridge

Take First Blood, swirl it together with Chinatown, and you’ve got a pretty solid bead on where director Jeremy Saulnier’s going with Rebel Ridge. His protagonist isn’t as riveting or dynamic as John Rambo, his script isn’t as tight or as cutting as Robert Towne’s, but he’s got a handle on the spirit of these films, the righteous wrath of the victim of police corruption and the sucking moral quagmire of small town governance and budgeting. If he had the guts to follow either trail to its conclusion, he’d probably have a nasty little gem on his hands, but while Rebel Ridge is by no means bad, neither is it willing to get down in the mud and really grapple with the things that it’s about. It has a great leading man in Aaron Pierre, but it keeps him pretty exclusively in the role of the Upright Man, going high whenever the police go low. It’s not that such a person couldn’t exist, it’s that he could never come out on top, and Saulnier’s story needs him to.

So, the action is good, if bloodless. The shot composition is capable, though the color grading falls firmly within the drab blue-orange hell of modern digital filmmaking. It’s an oddly innocent film to come from the guy who made Blue Ruin and Green Room, neither of which was afraid to get into the nasty, unavoidable realities of violence. It’s clear-eyed about the extent of police corruption and brutality, the lengths they’ll go to in order to avoid even the most trivial consequences, the laws shielding them even from the most justifiable self-defense imaginable, but when it comes to the wider system allowing this state of affairs to persist, it develops a kind of childlike suspension of disbelief. The local police are corrupt rednecks who will kill you for looking at them sideways, but as long as you don’t kill them back, the state-level authorities can swoop in and save the day.

The film’s third act is its weakest, devolving into a fantasy of good cops stopping bad ones and sucking all the tension out of Terry’s (Pierre) race to escape town with evidence incriminating its crooked chief of police, Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson). It’s a shame, because the film’s ability to manufacture tension is one of its defining strengths. The opening scene in which two cops run Terry off the road and then proceed to shake him down at gunpoint is a master class in simmering, agonizing suspense as you wait to see exactly what type of rotten these thugs are. Terry’s early exchanges with the town government, and especially his valiant bike ride to fist bump his prison-bound cousin through the window of a corrections department bus, are propulsive, exciting, and well-shot. The film’s early action scenes are fast-moving and clear. It’s only when it ventures into fantasy that its breakneck momentum peters out.