NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge begins with a scenario right out of a classic western: a lone man rides into a small town and almost instantly draws the ire of a crooked sheriff he must then fight against. Its details, however, make it a distinctly 21st-century story about top-down corruption in a time when we are more informed than ever about byzantine power structures. This seems like it’s going to be a meat-and-potatoes genre throwback. It’s much more complicated than that.
The small town is a flyspeck on the map called Shelby Springs, Louisiana. Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, who has the clear-eyed intensity of a full-fledged movie star) is passing through on his bike when a police cruiser purposefully hits him. It’s an all-too-familiar scene that instantly sets us on edge: a Black man menaced by two white police officers. The deputies (David Denman and Emory Cohen) discover $36,000 in cash in Terry’s backpack, cash he hoped would get his cousin, who’s in jail on a misdemeanor drug charge, out on bail. The cops seize the cash because, they say, it could be from a drug deal.
Now Terry is stuck in Shelby Springs, and in a bureaucratic nightmare. He dutifully follows the proper avenues to get his money back but is blocked at every turn. He doesn’t have the right paperwork. The courthouse doesn’t have a public defender on staff. Even if the case goes before a judge, the legal fees will exceed the $36,000.
Don Johnson plays the town’s sheriff with the oily ease of a guy who knows he can get away with anything. There’s already stacks of confiscated cash in his evidence room, and he assumes Terry’s money will make its way into his annual budget. What he doesn’t know is that Terry is a former Marine, in a special class that can turn anything into a weapon. And then Terry shows up outside the precinct like a gunslinger at high noon.
Rebel Ridge has one of the most gripping opening hours I’ve seen in some time, though it slows down a bit in the middle section, when an enterprising law student (AnnaSophia Robb) gets involved in Terry’s predicament and realizes there’s something much darker going on. This stretch resembles one of those John Grisham adaptations we got so many of 30 years ago, with the two of them creeping down dark hallways and digging through file cabinets and dealing with a two-faced judge played by James Cromwell.
The movie comes roaring back at the end, with a standoff outside the police station that involves car chases, hand-to-hand combat and some unexpected shifts in allegiance. This is not a movie of bloodthirsty revenge, even though it’s set up that way—and even though our lizard-brain impulses might want it to be. Saulnier is too clever a filmmaker to be so obvious.
He has made some brutal films, including the white-knuckler Green Room, but the brutality in Rebel Ridge is systemic, institutional. It’s exploring heady issues with the Trojan horse of a screw-tightening thriller, and it ultimately has more to say about the contradictions and inconsistencies of the American legal system than so many superficially noble dramas that tackle those issues head-on.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic for Spokane Public Radio, and one of the regular co-hosts on Movies 101 heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.