Joe Carnahan’s career has been relatively erratic since his still very well-regarded breakout feature Narc from 2002. Since, he’s mostly churned out gritty but generic crime dramas — which is to say, for every genuine winner like The Grey, you get a couple of clunkers like Boss Level or Stretch. Thankfully, he’s fully in his wheelhouse with The Rip (incidentally, his third feature released in the last eight months — you can’t say the guy isn’t busy), which is, you guessed it, a gritty crime drama, but one with a sturdy cast and just enough amusingly goofy plot swerves to keep things tasty.
After the murder of a colleague, Lt. Dumars (Matt Damon) and Detective Sgt. Burns (Ben Affleck) find themselves in a hell of a situation when their Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT, and yes that’s somehow a real thing) finds $20 million in cartel money stashed in a suburban Miami house. The team is immediately thrown into both suspicion and mortal danger, made all the worse when a squad of bad guys shows up to shoot up the house and steal the money for themselves.
The first hour or so of The Rip bounces between a sort of chamber mystery, with the team trying to figure out which one of them might be a rat, and a single-location trap movie a la Assault on Precinct 13. It’s executed with a nice mix of genre, pepped up with a lot of hollow but fun macho dialogue — sample: “Columbians do have great coke!” — and the occasional shaky-cam shootout, and we get to spend a lot of time with the killer cast on the team, including Teyana Taylor and Steven Yuen. There’s also a cute money-sniffing dog named Wilbur (played by Wilbur The Dog, according to the credits), which is its own kind of cheat code in these testosterone-driven adrenaline rushes.
Carnahan hasn’t even been much of a stylist and that doesn’t change here, but he does manage to do as much as he can with this very dark, shadowy film, especially given the brutal Netflix compression — it probably looks better than this, too, but there’s no way to tell. And as the action sequences become more elaborate and the movie leaves the house, he’s able to play around a good deal with geography, a welcome ramp-up that leads to a pretty solid car chase finale.
Speaking of, things get very appropriately sillier in the last third, as alliances shift and we replay previous scenes from different perspectives, transforming The Rip into more of an Agatha Christie thriller with Damon as a Poirot or Benoit Blanc type, only loaded up with tac gear and an AR. There’s even a hilarious explainer scene set in the back of an armored personnel carrier. And then there are the bonus points earned for having sturdy performers like Kyle Chandler show up as a SWAT commander and Scott Adkins as Affleck’s FBI agent brother. So sure, the whole thing is ludicrous and more than a little confusing, but for the sort of thing that’s going to live on streaming forever, there’s mercifully little to complain about here. Your dad will love this, and you’ll have an okay time, too.
DIRECTOR: Joe Carnahan; CAST: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor Scott Adkins; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: January 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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