‘Rebel Ridge’ Review: Jeremy Saulnier’s Veteran-on-the-Run Riff Fails to Draw Fresh Blood
Many movies have been made about soldiers whose skill set proves out of step once they re-enter the civilian world. Some of them treat those differences with empathy and insight; but more often than not, they leverage them for explosive, empty action sequences. “Rebel Ridge” mostly falls perfunctorily in the latter category.
Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier (“Green Room”), the film’s focus on a Black soldier adds degrees of complexity to the conflicts that erupt between him and local law enforcement in a small, mostly white town. But if racial politics (cinematic and otherwise) prompt Saulnier to treat him marginally more thoughtfully than most movie veterans, the filmmaker’s obligations to genre formula end up overshadowing those differences by the time the last empty, explosive action sequence has unfolded.
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Aaron Pierre (“Genius: MLK/X”) plays Terry Richmond, a veteran of the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP) who’s knocked off his bicycle and detained by two police officers, Marston (David Denman) and Lann (Emory Cohen), while traveling to the town of Shelby Springs to bail out his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc). Marston and Lann confiscate the $36,000 in his backpack, indicating that he can make an appeal to recover it in the next several weeks — a delay that will send Mike to jail, since the deadline for payment is the end of the day. Undeterred, he visits Shelby Springs’ police department to report Marston and Lann for the theft of his money. But before Terry can finish filing his claim, Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) intervenes and offers him a last-minute opportunity to see Mike before he’s driven to jail.
Upon his return, Terry discovers that Chief Burnne misled him: Mike is already gone. After learning how to get Mike put into protective custody from a helpful court clerk, Summer McBride (Annasophia Robb), Terry overpowers Burnne and several of his officers inside the Chief’s own station in order to get his money back to take to the courthouse. Though the siege doesn’t solve the problems with Mike it’s meant to, neither does it escalate Terry’s conflict with local authorities; to the contrary, Burnne and his men become suspiciously helpful. The about-face in their behavior only intensifies Terry’s curiosity about the sleepy Southern town, so he reconnects with McBride and begins to investigate what may really be going on while attempting to resolve the situation with his cousin.
It feels irresponsible not to mention “First Blood,” the “Taken” films and even stuff like “Walking Tall” that have mined versions of this premise for tension, but Saulnier differentiates his interpretation first and most significantly by making his veteran a person of color. That choice impacts Terry’s behavior from the first scene to the last, not just in restraining his well-earned exasperation at callous and corrupt white cops while they’re profiling and over-policing him, but as the film progresses, in the revenge he exacts which, though again fully justified, casts a different shadow on a Black man’s behavior than if he was white. Whether or not Saulnier’s script means to do so intentionally, Terry is constantly maneuvering to prevent white discomfort, both in the film and for the audience watching it. And “Rebel Ridge” doesn’t make it easy to determine if that’s an act of artistic progressivism (a Black character so skilled and diplomatic to be able to expertly navigating white spaces) or one that’s almost nostalgically regressive (à la Sidney Poitier-1960s-style Black exceptionalism).
Whichever of the two it might be, it robs the action of much of its intensity, not to mention the vulgar pleasures of watching corrupt racists receive a gratifyingly violent comeuppance. As we learn early in the film, Terry is a survivalist, pulling fish out of streams for sustenance with his bare hands, and an especially well-trained one, as an instructor of military martial arts. But as cool as it may be for him to be able to disarm an opponent or eject the munitions from a firearm with a blinding flick of the wrist, those outcomes are comparatively less exciting when he’s facing off against a small army of cops who are less afraid of using a hard ‘r’ in public than they are of pulling a trigger.
The number of action films that make a deliberate point of avoiding the protagonist using gun violence is few, but among those that do, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “The Rundown” bake them into the characters and plot in a way that pushes the story forward. Here, it feels like bumpers in bowling lane gutters: the destination may be the same, but the journey getting there is less risky — and less exciting.
That said, Saulnier’s approach to the action is straightforward and clear, and if there’s not a lot of pizazz, viewers always have a clear sense of geography wherever Terry happens to be facing off against the authorities. Moreover, Pierre conveys both the restraint and precision of Terry’s training, and the frustration that simmers beneath it, and it makes the character consistently sympathetic (that is, if for some reason one has difficulty empathizing with a decorated serviceman unnecessarily and unlawfully prevented from helping a relative who’s in danger). His coiled intensity provides a perfectly understated counterpoint to Johnson as Chief Burnne, reprising a version of characters he’s played in “Django Unchained” and elsewhere, where his authority is assumed but not quite unassailable, and anyone looking too closely at his fiefdom must be discouraged with extreme prejudice.
While the film is further packed with character actors making a meal out of their minor roles, Robb as McBride and Zsane Jhe as the police force’s sole Black woman, Jessica Sims, deliver deeper human connections with Terry that by circumstance or design are absent from the other locals. Robb’s roles on film since her breakout turns in “Because of Winn-Dixie” and “Bridge to Terabithia” have proved slightly anemic, but her work here shows that steady opportunities on television have kept her talents sharp, and she makes McBride into someone more complex than Shelby Springs’ sole white do-gooder. Similarly, Jhe complicates expectations of the bonds between people of color in primarily white spaces as a cop working with Burnne’s regime, and her journey ranks with Terry’s as one of the most interesting in the film.
Ultimately muscular and effective if predictable, Saulnier’s latest reaffirms his bona fides as a deliverer of sturdy, tightly-controlled thrills. Not unlike the men who are often the focus of stories like this, “Rebel Ridge” is a film where familiar instincts too often take over, when a more nuanced or inventive approach might have produced a more satisfying end result for all involved.
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