Collaborations between old pals Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are always worth watching, whether they result in classics like Good Will Hunting or could-have-beens like Air. Writer-director Joe Carnahan’s filmography has been similarly hit and miss, with bangers such as The Grey interspersed with clangers like The A-Team.
So, a sense of cautious expectation greets this chewy cop thriller, which was “inspired by true events”, but feels very much like a product of the movies. Frankly, with a first act this exciting, who cares?
When Miami cop Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) is gunned down in cold blood, it sends shockwaves through her unit, the TNT (Tactical Narcotics Team). New boss – and grieving father – Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Damon) wants the murder solved fast. His right-hand man, Detective Sergeant JD Byrne (Affleck), was Velez’s lover, and keeps her gun as the ultimate tribute.
The rest of the team – played by Steven Yeun (TV’s Beef), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another) and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Ballerina) – close ranks as the FBI (headed by Scott Adkins, as Byrne’s younger brother) starts its interrogations. This may sound like an almighty info dump, but it’s so well-written and performed it plays out like sweary, high-stakes drama.
Following an anonymous tip-off, the team head to a drug cartel safe house, where they find a young woman, Desi (Sasha Calle), with $20 million stashed in the attic. The question the film pivots on is: what should they do next? The cartel is coming to kill everyone, they don’t trust their superiors with the cash and, as Dumars notes, “It would be so much easier if we stole this money.” For those unaware of Miami PD vernacular, “The Rip” is slang for when cops do exactly that.
But with the stage all set for an exhilarating Assault on Precinct 13 update, Carnahan drops the ball. Just as the tension should be ramping up, it begins to dissipate, with characters wandering off alone, making stupid decisions, and concealing so many secrets it gets tough to track their motivations, let alone stay emotionally involved. “The thing about lying,” says Dumars, “it becomes real hard to keep those timelines straight". The film has the same problem.
Oddly, for what sets itself up as a siege movie, things improve when the main characters leave the house. There’s a terrifically thorny back-and-forth in an RV, before a generic action movie climax ushers in a far-too-mushy coda.
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The title of Carnahan’s debut, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, seems to have informed the rest of his career. But his films are actually more interesting when they focus on moral dilemmas, as in the underrated Narc, then when they’re going hell for leather. In the case of The Rip, this can be boiled down to a tattoo Dumars has on his hand: “AWTGG”, or “Are we the good guys?”
All in all, it’s quite a ride, yet the more things it tries to do, the less well it does them. As an adrenalised Friday night action flick it ticks all the right boxes, but it also feels like less than the sum of its – admittedly impressive – parts. Oscar-winning screenwriters Damon and Affleck served as producers. Couldn’t they have done a draft to pull all the threads together? Maybe next time.
The Rip is now streaming on Netflix.
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