(2.5 stars)
There’s an inherent power to an acting pair who spend years in collaboration across different projects. We’ve seen a few over the years: Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci.
At some point, it’s impossible to separate our history with them — their various characters, the relationships between said characters — from the text on the screen. All those years, all those other movies, it all plays a role. Formalism/New Criticism becomes nearly impossible. We’ve seen too much.
That can be a lot to carry into a movie, as we see the new venture from our Boston boys. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are back with “The Rip,” a straight-to-Netflix thriller directed by Joe Carnahan (“Smokin’ Aces,” “The Grey”) that pits the friends against each other in a gleefully grubby acting showcase that involves an awful lot of yelling creative expletives back and forth.
It seems inevitable that casual fans who are scrolling the service for a weekend watch might see their names and click on it, thinking they’re in for another adult drama like “Good Will Hunting” or “Air.” They might be surprised.
Let’s cut to the chase. If you like hard-bitten crime and cop genre B-movies with an extra heaping of all the clichés, you’ll dig “The Rip.” If you don’t, you probably won’t. The all-caps cracked font of the title (and the title itself) tells you pretty much all you need to know. This movie doesn’t transcend genre, nor does it want to.
I don’t mean that as an insult. I love hard-bitten crime and cop genre B-movies, and as such I had 80 percent of a great time watching “The Rip.”
The premise is simple: Following the mysterious murder of their captain amid rumors of a cabal of dirty cops secretly stealing drug money, a group of Miami police (Affleck, Damon, Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, Catalina Sandino Moreno) raids a suburban stash house and finds more than $20 million in cash they assume to be cartel money. Do they play things by the books, or do they take a taste? Allegiances start forming; trust begins faltering.
Damon (Lieutenant Dane Dumars) and Affleck (Detective Sergeant JD Byrne) begin the movie as brothers-in-arms but spend most of it at odds, acting against their own charm and against their own public image of chummy best friends from the block.
The only thing the camera likes more than shadows is their faces, which it lingers on repeatedly, and for good reason: Both are hangdog as hell. They look weathered and grimy. They look old. It’s almost as if they saw that famous 2016 meme of Affleck smoking a cigarette with the weight of the world bearing down on him and decided to base both their characters on it.
The movie, too, repeatedly goes out of its way to remind you how gritty it is, which will probably make your eyes roll at least once or twice. This is adult pulp entertainment, it screams at you early on, as Affleck’s character repeatedly calls someone that word (and, no, he doesn’t say “see you next Tuesday”) and as Damon rubs the tattoos on his hands for the hundredth time.
The movie may be set in Miami-Dade County and be about a group of cops, but this is not “Miami Vice.” The setting plays so little a role, the movie could have been set in any major American city. (Maybe the boys were trying to avoid going back to Boston yet again?) So don’t expect Jet Skis and beach views. Most of the movie, indeed the best parts of it, are set inside a house at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac as tensions simmer and the whole place becomes a veritable boiler room.
Sadly, the movie doesn’t have the confidence to remain a chamber piece. It’s not immune to the disease unleashed on genre movies since the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the one whose primary symptom is a ludicrous, almost 20-minute action set piece that stretches for so long and gets so big, it simply becomes boring.
There’s cop jargon galore, as the title, Miami police slang for seizing criminal assets, suggests. And, of course, there are twists on twists on twists, none of which will surprise veterans of these kinds of ridiculous genre movies but might leave the more sane-minded audience member confused.
So, I repeat myself: If you go for this kind of fare, you’ll have a good time. If you don’t, you’ll probably find it off-putting.
And that actually matters more than usual, because “The Rip” has some real-life stakes that could affect the future of streaming.
Since establishing themselves as collaborative industry usurpers with 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” Affleck and Damon have publicly wrestled with the industry, trying to make it more equitable for people without names like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Hence their founding of Project Greenlight, which gave first-time filmmakers the chance to direct a feature, and the production company Artists Equity. Affleck toldthe New York Times the goal of the latter is “to institute fairness and address some of the real issues that are present and urgent for our business.”
With “The Rip,” they’ve challenged the status quo at Netflix. The company has always paid a flat fee to the cast and crew of its proprietary shows and movies. Traditional productions, meanwhile, pay some people a flat fee and give others back-end deals to make money if the film performs well. (These deals are a common way to get bigger names into smaller movies.)
But, as the Times reported, Artists Equity pushed for a different deal: If “The Rip” performs well, then every one of the 1,200 people who worked on the movie will get a one-time bonus. It’s unclear how much that bonus is or what would trigger it.
It could signal a new future for the streaming industry. But for that to happen, people need to watch it, and that might be a tough sell for a movie that won’t be universally appealing.
But for fans of the genre, this one will rip.
R. Streaming on Netflix. Contains pervasive language, violence. 112 minutes.
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