A war veteran shows up in a smalltown for personal business and becomes the target of a police-orchestrated manhunt after a series of mishaps. That is the plot of the 1982 blockbuster “First Blood” starring Sylvester Stallone as the livewire action-hero, John Rambo. It launched a decades-long franchise and a lineage of imitators and descendants, some better than others. The recently released Netflix thriller “Rebel Ridge” from director-writer Jeremy Saulnier is one of those descendants. This time around our veteran is a former Marine – Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre). He is less jacked, but still imposing. And, significantly, Terry is a Black man.
This racial dynamic is a central preoccupation in “Rebel Ridge”. With its very pointed account of a Black man increasingly terrorised by a mostly white police force, the baser carnal thrills of a lone-wolf figure battling the establish-ment becomes more fraught. Here, Saulnier’s diverges from most film of its ilk and retains a socially aware imperative. What “Rebel Ridge” aims to do – at least ostensibly – is present an assessment of the corruption at the centre of policing through the familiar beats and colours of an action blockbuster. For much of its running time, in form and structure, it presents itself as a flirtation with genre filmmaking that deigns to offer more than just the thrills. It is a noble effort, but in action the film is more complicated than its intentions would have it be.
We open in the present day, but the first sounds we hear hail from 1982, just like “First Blood”. The opening credits play as we hear the first verse of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” overhead. We first see Terry cycling through a lone thoroughfare, surrounded by woods, with his earphones plugged in. He is locked into the pulsating rhythms. If the Revelations influenced rock-song about evil holds metaphorical weight it is in the way that Terry’s life soon lurches into a nightmare of escalating proportions. This is not a dream, though, but real life. Unbeknownst to him, he is being tailed by a police-car and a collision soon knocks him off his bike sending the plot careening into escalating tragedies.
This opening sequence establishes the racialised underbelly that defines a lot of “Rebel Ridge”. Terry is an imposing Black man, whose calm countenance irritates Officers Evan Marston (David Denman) and Steve Lahn (Emory Cohen) in that first meeting. Saulnier blocks the scene with echoes of the too-familiar tales of presumed guilt for Black men cornered by police: Terry is violently thrown to the ground and cuffed with little chance to explain himself. When thirty thousand dollars is found in his backpack, they seize it as civil forfeiture. This complicates things for Terry. He is currently en route to post bail for his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc) who has been arrested on a marijuana possession charge and needs to post bail by the day’s end to avoid being transferred to state prison where his life could be in danger from testifying against a gangster several years ago. This string of bad luck keeps escalating and the only person who seems willing to help him is a courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb as Summer) with little power. Before the end of the first act, Terry finds himself in a taut stand-off with Police Chief Burnne (Don Johnson) and the seemingly lone person of colour on the force, a Black officer Sims (Zsané Jhé). The first of several extended sequences where his Martial Arts training and nonviolent approach to combat becomes frontloaded. This is not Rambo with a machine gun, but a man insistent on countering the imprudent violence of the police force with alternative skills. It’s a compelling set-up, but it’s one that soon reveals itself at odds with the instincts of the genre it’s working within.
By invoking an explicit conversation on race relations and policing in America, “Rebel Ridge” boxes itself into a pocket of realism that the genre it’s working in struggles to sustain. The dynamic reveals an inherent bifurcation that threatens the over-plotted legal issues that define the plot of the film’s second half when Terry unwittingly reveals secrets of the town’s judicial and police system. The thrill of every lone-wolf vigilante who has followed in the footsteps of John Rambo has been the teasing expectation of waiting for justice to be served, and for the bad guys to get what’ is coming to them. Interpolating this with a very serious conversation about the racialised dyna-mics of policing leaves “Rebel Ridge” in an awkward position where it structurally wants to imitate a high-octane action-thriller but often feels like it’s toeing the line between a kind of respectability politics that has Terry being the noblest badass. This is the kind of man who asks a corrupt judge if he needs to take any medication before he ties him up after his nefariousness is revealed. It’s an easy sign of a good guy to root for, but as “Rebel Ridge” goes on it begins to curdle a little at how Terry seems more like a noble paragon of virtue than a human figure reacting to a world working against him.
It’s one thing for a film to have good politics, whatever that might mean, but it’s another thing when a character is forced to become an audience surrogate for those politics in ways that begin to interrupt the very characterisation so central to its development. It is not just that Terry does not harm, but it is that “Rebel Ridge” fails and refuses to consider him wavering in his nonviolence. This same man who dares to have a showdown with a police-chief because he’s out of options in the film’s first and strongest third becomes devoid of moral greyness for the remainder of the film seeming to manifest the hauntingly empty ‘when they go low, we go high’ rhetoric that has come to haunt so much of liberal media since Michelle Obama’s well-meaning but ultimately unrealistic philosophy at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. It becomes impossible to harbour genuine emotion and care for this story when it cannot commit to giving the audience the much-needed catharsis of righteous vengeance on the evil-doers, but also is ill-equipped to truly engage with the psychological effects of Terry’s reality. For “Rebel Ridge” to work, it would need to honestly account for the great effort it takes for Terry not to buckle under the anger his character would be carrying but too much in the film is content to have him coolly consider his enemies with stoicism that seems too remote than meaningful.
It means a lot that the film’s most touching scene is a moment where, after being misled by the Police Chief, Jeremy rides to meet Mike who is being escorted away on a police bus. The two have a fractured conversation as the bike travels alongside the bus. Neither Terry, nor the audience, know we will not see him alive again, and it’s Mike I kept thinking of as “Rebel Ridge” finds itself rerouting itself to insist on its own stoic morality. In Mike, Saulnier conjures a searing example of a Black man wronged by the system giving Terry enough reason to wage his battle against injustice. But it’s a sign of the film’s own lack of nerve that it can’t commit to the significance of Mike’s story, who the narrative too quickly forgets. Instead, “Rebel Ridge” must build a parallel plot with Summer who becomes a main character in the film’s second half. Robb and Pierre have good chemistry, but Saulnier’s insisting on using her tragedy as Terry’s focal point for retribution leaves the film wavering between intentions in ways that become too hazy to commit to.
By the time the film reaches its climax, where multiple monologues clumsily recount the reasons for the police corruption what began as a trenchant repudiation of police malpractice begins to feel like a more neutered film than was sold to audiences. Even its initial anger against the police system as one built on injustice begins compromised by an insistence on walking back some of its harshest critiques of the system. As an exploration of injustice, it is ambivalent. As a cathartic high-octane revenge thriller, it is limp. As a character study, it is too tetchily schematic to offer more than ambling pleasures and as a cog in the wheel of law enforcement on screen it sounds a desultory confirming cry that there are certain futures too impossible to imagine – even in the imagined world of a fantasy thriller, we cannot have a film that summarily rejects the idea of policing as an inherent good. When we draw back to consider the insidious harmfulness of police in “Rebel Ridge”, it means something that a film so easily positioning them as evil still hedges its bets on what its willing to show by the film’s end. The first 45-minutes offer something taut and fulsome, but by its end “Rebel Ridge” feels too banal to be exciting.
Rebel Ridge is playing on Netflix
