Some filmmakers get stuck in their formative years and it becomes a reflection on their work no matter how long they live. Quentin Tarantino seems to be stuck in the 1970s. Floyd Mutrux wrote, produced and directed movies that were mostly set in the 1950s and early 1960s. It happens. Your late teens and early 20s are usually those moments when you feel like you’re going to live forever and you got so much options ahead of you.
The Rip, which recently dropped on Netflix, is directed by Joe Carnahan, who co-wrote the script. Most of his movies feel like they were plucked out of the 1980s and early 1990s and given a nice jolt of new energy. If this movie had been released 40 years ago, TBS would’ve advertised it in the Y2K era as “Movies for guys who like movies.”
Before Taylor Sheridan started making TV shows where manly men are married to hot women who aren’t too smart and know their place and Tom Hanks started making “dadporn” flicks about boats and Cold War espionage, these were the type of movies that a lot of red-blooded all-American men watched.
I laugh at the fact The Rip has been dropped in the middle of January on Netlix. It’s the type of movie that would be dumped during the winter months when they knew only a certain demographic would be interested in it. And for what it’s worth, this pairing of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon adds a nice twist. The two have been working together since the early 1990s in about a dozen movies give or take. Hell, it’s become trivia they were in attendance at the Boston Red Sox game that was used in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, even though they’re not on screen.
Here they play hardened veteran police with the Miami-Dade County Police Department. Damon is the Lt. Dane Dumars, second in command of the Tactical Narcotics Team and Affleck is Sgt. J.D. Byrne. But there’s a little sense of animosity between the two as Byrne feels he has been cheated out of a promotion to lieutenant that Dumars received. They are also being grilled on the shooting death of their captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) when the movie opens. Just like his previous movies, Smokin’ Aces and Copshop, most of the action is set to one place that almost seems more ominous.
This time, it’s a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a Hialeah neighborhood. The TNT go to a house on a tip where they are met with resistance by Desireee “Desi” Lopez (Sasha Calle), who claims the house was her grandmother’s who recently passed away. But they find millions of cash in buckets hidden behind a wall in the attic.
It’s at this point the movie has a lot of twists and turns as Dumars and Byrne argue over what to do next. And there’s not much more I can tell as even describing it is too complicated. You just have to see it. There’s also phone calls being made to the house telling them to get out. Even though the neighborhood houses look like they’re occupied, no one appears to be home as night falls.
Dumars collects everyone’s cell phone but doesn’t immediately call it into his supervisor per department protocol. Det. Mike Ro (Steven Yeun) has a burner phone tucked away between his bullet-proof vest and his shirt that he’s communicating on. He also seems to notice that one of the lights outside a nearby house is sending Morse code.
It’s become obvious we don’t know who to trust and who is legitimate and who might grab the money and run. It’s believed to belong to the drug cartels but Desi’s story isn’t making sense to the cops who know she is lying.
Affleck and Damon may be from Boston but it’s still a stretch to see them as real cops, even though they both have scruffy beards and extra meat on their bones. I’m not talking about muscles but the type of body fat men in their 40s and early 50s get that they no longer give a fuck about losing. Dumars and Byrne are the type of cops who both have a divorce they’re still having to play alimony and/or child support on. So, it’s easy to see them as possible corrupt cops who are more than willing to put a few buckets in their patrol vehicle and notify their supervisors of the other money they found.
Yet they still have the shadow of a murdered cop looming over them. Even if they turn over all the money, how much their unit gets is up to the bureaucrats.
Of course, there’s Det. Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who could very easily use just a fraction of the money for some good reason. It’s too bad Carnahan doesn’t give the women in the movie much to do. I don’t mean to very critical but I don’t see what the big fucking deal is about Teyena Taylor. Here, she is given the useless role of Det. Numa Baptiste who spends most of her scenes counting money when she isn’t doing the black jive woman routine that is usually given to Tiffany Haddish or Keke Palmer.
And when you cast an actor like Kyle Chandler as DEA agent Mateo “Matty” Nix, you know that he’s going to be crucial to the plot as well. Unlike Copshop or Boss Level, which made good use of actresses Alexis Louder and Michelle Yeoh respectively, this movie just seems to be for the boys’ club.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 