As a push takes place against drug cartels in Florida, Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) of the Miami-Dade Police Department is murdered, but manages to send out a text before two hooded figures deliver the fatal shots.
There’s an investigation into her death, with lingering rumours of police corruption and even suggestions that someone within her own team may have betrayed her. However, all of them seem to be determined to bring her killers to justice. Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon) tells his team they’ve had a tip-off of a significant amount of dirty drug money, somewhere between $100-350K, being stored at a house in an otherwise quiet cul-de-sac. It’s a time-is-a-factor situation and so an already tired unit speed off to the area with a plan to search the property. The lone occupant is Desi (Sasha Calle), who says she has no knowledge of any hidden contraband but lets the team enter, supposedly looking for drugs.
The team eventually find the illicit contents, but it is neither $350K nor narcotics… the seizure or ‘RIP’ is at least $20 million in cold, hard cash. Usual rules stipulate that any amount of money has to be counted on-site and verified to prevent any amount ‘disappearing’ thereafter, but Dumars points out that such a huge amount creates a series of problems. Will a cartel let such a huge amount go so easily and for that kind of money, could police corruption lead to the team’s safety being jeopardised? Dumars demands everyone’s cell-phones so that news of the vast haul doesn’t leak until they’ve fully contained the situation, but his team begin questioning his actions and worry he may have an agenda of his own. Then a call comes in to the property, telling them to take what they expected to find and get out or suffer the consequences, even his second-in-command Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne calls Dumars out on his contradicting stories…
Time may have run out as gunfire erupts and a siege situation begins…
*Some spoilers…*
In recent years Netflix has produced and platformed a number of mainstream movies with A-List casts. Some of them genuinely excite and might well have made their way to the multiplex had they not been for squeezed launch-dates and pandemic problems. Yet there’s also a large swathe where it’s easy to see why a title landed away from the big screen – either due to over-used tropes or simplistic set-ups, they are more disposable, guilty pleasures at best rather than solid audience-pullers.
So, going into The RIP there’s every suspicion that it could be the latter – something full of familiar faces and names but with an all-too familiar trench of good cops vs corrupt cops and nothing new to say. However, it turns out that as well as having the sheen and stamina, this is a production that knows the familiar ground it’s going to subvert and so slow-burns its way through its story, acknowledging the genre signposts but exuding enough confidence and structure and shifting alliances to make the tension build and even the most die-hard film fan settle in – not too comfortably – for the journey. With elements of both Michael Mann’s HEAT and Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, The RIP isn’t as unflinchingly great as either of the stone-cold classics and might still be a marmite outing, but it is definitely superior to most of the usual robbery-gone-awry thrillers and instead ends up being a thriller where a film playing its cards close enough to the bullet-proof vested chest throughout to keep you watching.
Director Joe Carnahan delivers what’s needed… letting his cast handle the heavy-lifting and letting the punchy pot-boiler bubble away. There’s a lot of tension, punctuated by gunfire, stand-offs and nervous set-ups… It’s good to see a film that attracts success but isn’t just some deliberate loose-end set-up for a franchise…
Admittedly, it all wreaks of barely-contained testosterone from the start. Affleck and Damon – friends since long before their awards for Good Will Hunting – have become Hollywood mainstays in the years since and they anchor a film which, to its credit, quickly becomes an ensemble piece with members of a Tactical Narcotics Team charged with tackling the cartels pushing product through Florida. (Sue me, but I liked the simple fact that one team member chastises investigators for calling it the ‘TNT team’ because the ‘T’ in that anacronym already stands for Team, similar to the complaint about the NAVY NCIS title with which that the hit show originally began!). The often rough and ready TNT don’t have many friends in the force and even their superiors are frustrated by tight-budgets and rumours of innate cop corruption throughout the area. An early scene, reminiscent of many a Fast and Furious cook-out also makes us believe that we’ll be in for might-over-right and banter-over-brains entry, but once we establish the bravado status of all involved, things get far tighter and more claustrophobic. Beyond the catnip re-pairing of Affleck and Damon, there’s also a solid supporting cast. There’s The Walking Dead‘s Steven Yeun, Lanterns‘ Kyle Chandler, Nestor Carbonell. Scott Adkins (one of the UK’s best martial-artists) might be reduced to brief appearances as a shirt-and-tie FBI agent with a particular axe to grind, but he goes toe-to-toe with Affleck even in an office setting. Catalina Sandino Moreno (the first Colombian to be nominated for an Academy Award for her work in Maria, Full of Grace) and One Battle After Another‘s Teyana Taylor play members of the strike team and prove to be far more than just the decoration lesser films might have provided. Sasha Calle, so briefly the DCU‘s Supergirl in The Flash, is also in the mix as the lone occupant of the house that TNT are investigating.
Despite picking up on some supposedly throwaway lines early on, this was one of the few films where I genuinely didn’t know where the film was going to end up. The idea of a close-knit team suddenly looking at each other and wondering whom they can really trust in a good, classic recipe for drama. Like the promotional materials note, you can try to surmise the nooks and crannies of the obvious duplicities on show and you can’t really afford to trust anyone or, at least, you have to question everyone’s motivations. Some of the decisions and story points are there for the service of the plot and the scenery (all the TNT members drive suspiciously nice cars etc, etc.) and some aspects rely on luck and timing, but that’s somewhat par for the course and The Rip keeps things consistently taut enough that you’re swept along. And to be fair, the minute you might raise a mental query, the film tends to give you a possible answer and asks you to believe it. The film has the confidence to play a majority of its story in the house and cul-de-sac with the aforementioned cartel payload, though it doesn’t quite have to the courage of its convictions to stay there for the eventual denouement – which involves embracing that Fast and Furious formula of a thankfully brief car-chase. There’s the sinking feeling that it might yet waste the goodwill it’s maintained and just settle for a sub-par ending (the fate of far too many wannabees), but though your mileage may vary, it just about works and holds together as the credit roll. It’s good to see a film that attracts success but isn’t just some deliberate loose-end set-up for a franchise.
Director Joe Carnahan delivers what’s needed, cutting back on the sheer bluster of The A-Team movie, Bad Boys for Life, the Death Wish remake etc, and letting his cast handle the heavy-lifting and letting the punchy, pot-boiler bubble away. There’s a lot of tension, punctuated by gunfire, stand-offs and nervous set-ups. Some have complained about the frequent profanity that runs through the film, and though there’s a multitude of profanity along the way, it never seems to be there as a crutch for the story. If swearing is what really bothers you, then there’s other fare to choose from across the streaming platforms.
Definitely a movie I’d have actually paid to see at the cinema, The RIP is a ripping yarn that is worth the slow burn start…
- Story9
- Acting9
- Direction9
- Production Design / VFX9
