The worst thing about Netflix’s mysteriously dumped thriller Rebel Ridge is its abysmally generic title. Sounding like some anonymous action slop that might star a lesser-known Hemsworth, one might expect that, along with a brawn over brains trailer and a barely existent PR campaign, it’s yet another one of the streamer’s low-impact time-erasers. But there’s far more here to chew on, a full three-course meal cropping up on a platform that usually distracts us with snacks, and one of the most damning arguments to be made against a film-maker of note partnering with them, a movie that deserved the very most somehow saddled with the very least.
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, who broke out with Blue Ruin and then the magnificently gnarly Green Room, worked with Netflix for his patchy adaptation of Hold the Dark back in 2018, a film that did at least get a Toronto film festival premiere. His follow-up has found itself strangely adrift, denied even a token theatrical release and cruelly landing in the middle of fall festival season yet without a spot at Venice, Telluride or Toronto. Perhaps it’s the curse that started back in 2020 when production was halted just weeks after the beginning of Covid and continued after a restart in May 2021, which stopped again the following month when original star John Boyega dropped out. It took until the following year for everything to reassemble, sans Boyega, and now two years later, it lands without fanfare when it deserves a parade.
