What’s It About

A group of Miami cops discovers a stash of millions in cash, leading to distrust as outsiders learn about the huge seizure, making them question who to rely on.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Look, I really wanted to like “The Rip.” When I first heard that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were finally teaming up for a gritty cop thriller on Netflix, I was expecting a memorable one. However, what was delivered this January feels like homework that no one wanted to finish. The movie attempts to explore the question of whether cops can stay clean when they’re staring at millions of dollars right in front of them, but it never really takes that question seriously enough to commit to an answer. The story opens with a Miami narcotics unit dealing with a sudden blow. One of their own, detective Jackie, is shot and killed in the first scene. This sets up the whole atmosphere. Everyone is suspicious of each other because corruption is rumored to be deep in this department. Federal agents arrive asking tough questions, the situation escalates, and you can smell the spreading mistrust like a thickening fog. This is where Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Damon) comes in, who even has tattooed hands and keeps on asking, “Are we the good guys?” Wow, the movie lacks subtlety here. Dane gets an anonymous tip about a house hiding drug money somewhere from $75, 000 to $250, 000, depending on which cop he’s seen talking to. That, right off the bat, seemed odd to me. To different people to give different amounts? The film tries to draw your attention to this, but it’s so blatantly obvious that there is no surprise later on. Dane calls back the rest of the team for what is supposed to be a quick job on a Friday night. There’s JD Byrne (Affleck), who is pissed at the world, and also the boyfriend of the late detective. Then, there’s the rest of the team: Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno). They go to this Hialeah suburban house expecting an easy score for the narcotics department. Instead, behind a wall in the attic, they find roughly $20 million. The only person there is a young woman named Desi, who says that she just got the house as an inheritance and that she had no idea about the money. From the moment they find the money, nothing is the same. Dane doesn’t turn it in to the authorities right away. He takes everyone’s phones. People are questioning who they can trust. A threatening call comes in: take a small cut and walk away, or everyone dies. This is exactly where the film should have started to get really interesting, but it simply won’t. Director Joe Carnahan, who happened to be behind the office “The Grey,” decides to unleash paranoia and suspense by showing the cops at each other’s throats. The main problem with the film is that it reveals its tricks much too early. You can spot the twists from a long distance, in part due to how the actors are used, because when you cast an actor like Steven Yeun, who has been phenomenal in “Beef” and “Minari,” in a supporting role for a straight, to, streaming movie, one immediately wonders is there more to his character than meets the eye? The same thing happens with the rest of the cast. Kyle Chandler shows up as a DEA agent who is constantly around the investigation, and even his mere presence hints that he has a bigger role than the film initially suggests. Teyana Taylor, who just got Oscar buzz for “One Battle After Another, ” is seriously underutilized here. There is a brief moment when she and Moreno are counting the money and ponder laconically whether anyone would miss one stack, enough to change their lives and not be greedy. That single instant seemed human and posed genuine questions of ethics beyond money, but the film quickly dropped the ball to the next shootout and macho dramatics. Damon and Affleck’s chemistry is something you can’t deny. They’ve done so many movies together that their friendship literally bleeds through the screen, making their scenes together quite watchable even when the script fails them. Affleck is the loud, aggressive type, while Damon broods silently, harboring pain for losing a son to cancer. Both of them fully commit, but they are simply stuck with the material, which never gives them enough scope to go deeper. Almost nothing is communicated about the characters beyond their surface-level pain. ‘ Who do they become once this one night is over? What made them choose law enforcement? Why should we even care that they’re alive at the end? The movie exploits the theme of how good cops could even exist in a corrupted world, but barely touches it. Those tattooed hands questioning, “Are we the good guys?”, had the potential to be the springboard for a serious discussion on police ethics, accountability, and the ever-present temptation of getting caught up in the game when you are underpaid and overworked. But what a waste! The film just uses it as an item for visual interest that leads nowhere. Carnahan knows how to direct action sequences. His handling of gunfights is very intense and brilliantly captures the chaos that is typical of these kinds of confrontations. The city of Miami, with its smogginess and earthly hues, reflects the characters’ moral ambiguity as well. The movie, technically, doesn’t fail. Its pace is fairly brisk for a film that is almost entirely set within one house and the surrounding street. You are not bored, exactly, but you do get the sense of disappointment since there is so little actual development in the story. The biggest disappointment is that everything is so forgettable. “The Rip” will be gone from the Netflix algorithm in a matter of weeks. Nobody will even remember it once February rolls around. What the movie is saying in a nutshell is fine, it’s just not so bad as to be hateful, and it’s not nearly good enough to get you to recommend it. You could have watched it with pizza on a casual Friday night and still not felt like it was a waste of time, but it won’t be something you recall the following Monday. What irritates me most about this film is the colossal wasted opportunity. A movie about corrupt cops surrounded by millions in drug money, unravelling their own case, should be filled with suspense and thrills. It should constantly make you doubt the motives of the characters. It should reach a climax that would leave you wanting to immediately see the movie again to catch the things that you missed the first time. However, ‘The Rip’ accomplishes none of these. It is so transparent in its actions that you are always three steps ahead of it and simply wait for the characters to realize what you have known all along. For Damon and Affleck, this must be just another side project, something that was created because they enjoy working together rather than a story that gripped them so much that it demanded to be told. That may be great for them, but it leaves the audience with a film that never really explains the reason for its existence. With the kind of talent these two have, both in front and behind the camera, it is only fair that we get something special. But all we got is another January streaming release no one will be talking about by February. If you are craving a cop thriller and have absolutely nothing else to watch, “The Rip” will pass your time without offending you. However, in a world where there are countless better options just a click away, why settle for something as forgettable as this? Save your time for movies that have something to say.

OUR RATING – A DIRTY COP 4