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.
For starters, the plot centres on a civil forfeiture, a legal process that pretty much every US citizen may be genuinely concerned about. The trouble starts with a couple of cops effectively stealing $36,000 from ex-marine Terry Richmond via a process that allows law enforcement to seize property from ordinary citizens without any proof of criminal activity (“I thought it’d make a great premise for a movie because of how unifying it is,” says director Jeremy Saulnier in the film’s promotional material. “It pisses everyone off”). There’s a decent chunk of legalese woven into the drum-tight dialogue, with the worst excesses of the process laid infuriatingly bare; in a detail pulled straight from the headlines, it turns out the cops have bought themselves a margarita machine with confiscated money.
But just as importantly – and this is a bit of a spoiler – in the ensuing revenge rampage, Richmond doesn’t kill anyone. Faces get punched, bodies get slammed, and one arm gets gruesomely snapped – but as far as I can see, there isn’t a single on-screen death in the entire film. Richmond, you see, is an unarmed combat instructor who’s also well-versed in non-lethal alternatives to the usual shotguns and pistols (“We have to call ’em ‘less-lethal.’ Liability purposes.” says the police chief in one early confrontation). And so for most of the running time, he disarms and de-escalates, firing off tasers and flashbangs without ever starting a bodycount.
This is partly interesting because Saulnier’s other films are so good at portraying bits of the old ultraviolence: his debut Murder Party is absurd and exaggerated, subversive revenge thriller Blue Ruin is raw and awkward, and siege-horror Green Room is visceral, shocking, and very real. Rebel Ridge has plenty of the slickly choreographed Brazilian jiu-jitsu that’s a trademark of the revenge-thriller genre, but here it’s a way to incapacitate and immobilise, rather than a prelude to something more horrible. (In Green Room, for example, an ineffective chokehold leads to one of the film’s most gruesome moments.) Pierre’s size and real-life martial arts experience make all of this extremely convincing; the armlocks and throws are effortlessly fluid, and in one take that was apparently done without wires, he hauls another six-foot man halfway across a car park.
But it’s also interesting because the setting of Rebel Ridge almost demands this de-escalation, as more than one character points out throughout the two-hour runtime. The cops aren’t ever explicitly racist – they initially run Richmond off his bike for apparently no reason, before shaking him down for his cash – but there’s a feeling throughout the film that things could go horribly wrong at any moment. In Rambo, from 1982, another film with a police-harassment setup, the title character manages to machine-gun a sheriff’s office and (non-fatally) shoot the sheriff without suffering too much in the way of consequences. In 2024, it seems even less plausible that Richmond could shoot a cop and stand any chance of survival than that he could tear the wall off a police station. Ultimately, maybe that’s why Rebel Ridge feels like a breath of fresh mountain air, compared to the dozens of corpse-riddled action movies currently being produced by every streaming service. It might be a wish-fulfilment revenge fantasy, but suspension of disbelief only goes so far.
