Rebel Ridge Review | Green Room Director Signs First Blood

From director Jeremy Saulnier comes an action thriller starring Aaron Pierre. Our review of Rebel Ridge, now on Netflix:

Rides into view like a heavy metal riff on Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood, Rebel Back has one of the most exciting openings of any thriller uploaded to Netflix to date. Ex-soldier Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is swept off his bike by a police car and subjected to sustained questioning by the two officers who scrape him off the asphalt. Where is he going? What’s with those military tattoos? Why does he have over $30,000 in cash stashed in his bag?

It turns out Terry has a good reason for carrying the cash: He’s on his way to a Louisiana courthouse to post bail for his younger cousin, who was recently arrested for marijuana possession. If Terry doesn’t post bail by 5 p.m., his cousin will go to jail, where a gruesome fate awaits him. None of this matters to the two bull-necked, bearded cops, who seize the cash on the flimsy grounds that it’s laundered drug money.

Terry initially tries calmly to get the money back, but discovers that the theft is technically legal. Civil asset forfeiture, as AnnaSophia Robb’s trainee lawyer Summer explains at a local café, was put in place to “help the federal government fight cartels,” but it can also be used against individuals if there’s even the slightest suspicion that narcotics were involved.

Terry’s desperation soon brings him into conflict with the small-town police chief, Burnne (a delightfully unseemly Don Johnson), who takes sadistic pleasure in asserting his dominance over the young drifter in his midst. While Terry’s attempts to resolve the situation peacefully are thwarted, he reluctantly considers using stronger means to free his nephew.

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s premise is the stuff of a million action thrillers, but he’s the filmmaker behind such ironically effective pieces as Blue Ruin And Green roomso he’s constantly playing with genre conventions. Instantly, essentially reworking First Blood because the story of an African American versus a bunch of (mostly) white small town police officers gives it an intense political charge. No one says anything overtly racist in Rebel Backbut the toxicity is in the smirks, the sharp remarks and the generally dismissive way Terry is treated. And the more he is belittled and thrown around, the more we can see the anger building behind his eyes.

John Boyega was originally set to play Terry, but he abruptly left the production in 2021 under mysterious circumstances; he was later replaced by Pierre in what could be one of the most significant casting changes since Michael J Fox took over from Eric Stoltz. Back to the future.

Pierre is, quite simply, dynamite: his performance brings depth and nuance to what could have been a standard, sub-Jack Reacher action figure. Like Stallone’s John Rambo, he’s a loner adept at living off the land, while his military training makes him a force of nature that Burnne and his small group of untrained agents are ill-equipped to deal with. He’s effective as a physical performer, but more importantly, mesmerizing to watch in his verbal confrontations with Don Johnson. (His offhand delivery of “I think… no,” was a showstopper in the trailer and even more powerful in the film itself.)

At least the first hour, Rebel Back is nearly flawless, Saulnier skillfully setting up the stakes and building the tension. You can see the power of his direction from the understated way his opening plays out, right down to the sound of a dragonfly’s wings flying off a simmering highway. There’s also a real rush to a brief scene where Terry uses his panther-like strength to keep his bike level with a moving prison bus.

Then, as the plot begins to reach a climax, Rebel Ridge’s The second half is distracted by the minutiae of police corruption. And while it’s easy to see the point here, as Saulnier paints a plausible map of systemic rot that’s probably not all that uncommon in real-life America, the sense of waning tension is palpable.

The first half suggests all that corruption so effectively that it feels like overkill to stop to dissect how it works in such forensic detail. It would be like the original Star Wars spent half an hour explaining exactly what metals were used to build the Death Star. We don’t need to know how it’s made, we just need to know how deadly it is.

Even with these flaws, Rebel Back remains one of the most memorable thrillers to hit Netflix exclusively in years. It is undoubtedly a class above that largely identical Mission: Impossible Pretenders that the platform spends hundreds of millions on, with characters you can’t help but cheer for and dialogue that shows flashes of dry humor. Saulnier proves once again that he is one of the most gifted genre filmmakers working today, while Pierre may yet emerge as a real star. Yes, he really is that good.

Rebel Back is now available on Netflix.