If you’ve watched enough action movies over the last decade or so, you’ve probably noticed what feels like a bit of … an escalation. In the original John Wick, Keanu Reeves shoots, stabs and car-crashes his way through 77 mostly-unnamed mooks; by John Wick 4, he’s up to 140. Bullet Train, right at the whimsical-comedy end of the ballistic-ballet spectrum, features 152 individual onscreen deaths; Extraction 2, very much on the laugh-free side, has 108. (Commando, by far Arnie’s most violent film, has a mere 81).
Rebel Ridge, which scored 31.2m views over its first six days on Netflix, feels like an almost-deliberate antidote to all this carnage. Yes, it’s a classic bit of dad-coded competence porn: a tall, muscular stranger rolls into a small town run by corrupt cops, and proves to be almost supernaturally good at everything he needs to do to unseat them. Yes, there are deadpan monologues and one-liners galore (“I put too much sauce on that?” asks soon-to-be-household-name leading man Aaron Pierre after delivering one memorable bon mot). But it’s more than just a riff on Reacher, and the lack of fatalities is just one reason why.
