Rebel Ridge

I got a text from Beeso suggesting I check out this Netflix thriller, partly because it’s full of jujitsu, which is true. But it’s also chockablock full of insanely good film making.

I’m not much of a reviewer, so Imma just let Slate’s Jack Hamilton take it away.

It’s a minor outrage that you can’t watch Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge in a movie theater. Whip-smart, shiveringly taut, and ludicrously enjoyable, Rebel Ridge further establishes Saulnier as one of the finest genre filmmakers of his generation and might just be the flat-out best movie I’ve seen this year, even if I was forced to watch it in my basement. (The film, produced and distributed by Netflix, is streaming exclusively on the platform.)

The plot of Rebel Ridge is as lean and muscular as its protagonist, Terry Richmond, played by the British actor Aaron Pierre in a performance that deserves to make him a superstar. In the film’s opening scene, Terry is bicycling toward the rural Alabama town of Shelby Springs when he’s intentionally struck by a police car. Two white officers proceed to harass and briefly detain him, while also confiscating, via civil asset forfeiture, $36,000 in cash that Terry is carrying, $10,000 of which is meant to help bail out his cousin, who’s currently being held on a misdemeanor drug possession charge at the Shelby Springs jail.

Hamilton goes on to draw out a bunch of parallels between Rebel Ridge and the very first Rambo movie, which he reminds us was a lot deeper and more nuanced than the franchise it spawned. I felt the same thing as I watching it.

But I mostly felt like I didn’t want it to end. It was so good.