While I’m fully aware of the tropes of copaganda, I find that I still enjoy stories about good cops trying to root out bad cops. It’s why I can easily kick on a movie like “The Negotiator” where the mystery is about who you can trust and trying to find the truth in a highly fraught situation.
“The Rip” exists comfortably in this silly space where one character goes so far as to have the initials “A.W.T.G.G.” tattooed on his hand, an initialism for “Are We The Good Guys?” Joe Carnahan’s movie isn’t interested in the nuances of policing or the fuzzy morality of using the power of the state to commit acts of violence. It’s simply: There’s a bad guy among us, who is it, and how can we root them out? That’s it! And within those confines, Carnahan creates a pulse-pounding story until revealing said bad guy lets all the air out of the picture.
A special narcotics unit in Miami is under investigation after the murder of their captain, Jackie Velez (Lina Esco). Her murder appears tied to local stash houses of cash (a “rip”), and Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon) gets a tip that there could be a stash house that helps find Jackie’s killer. He brings the team together, which includes detectives Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Sgt. JD Byrne (Ben Affleck), who also happens to be Jackie’s lover. As they investigate a house belonging to local resident Desi (Sasha Calle), the group can feel the neighborhood closing in around them with dirty cops and cartel soldiers as well as the knowledge there could be a betrayer among them.
The first two thirds of “The Rip” feel like a terrific homage to some of John Carpenter’s finest films. Keeping the group trapped in Desi’s house with a large amount of cash gives the movie the feeling of “Assault on Precinct 13” where there’s a frequent siege mentality even though Carnahan wisely keeps his powder dry to wring the maximum amount of drama from the unknown threat outside.
But there’s also a dash of “The Thing” in here as well; no one knows who they can trust, and the film does little to clue us in on who the “hero” is. Damon and Affleck’s long careers are particularly helpful here as they’ve played both heroes and villains, and there’s no reason to assume Dane and JD are “good guys” simply because Damon and Affleck are the leads.
While it’s always fun to watch the two actors go head-to-head, “The Rip” isn’t much of a character drama. Everyone is a broadly sketched tough guy, as different from one another as the different colored astronauts from the video game “Among Us.” This is useful for the film maintaining the tension and refusing to tip its hand on who the traitor could be, but it also leeches the personality from the film, denying us any investment in these gruff, serious badasses. There’s the knowledge that when the traitor is ultimately revealed, it won’t really matter because you don’t really care about these people as individuals any more than we’re invested in the plastic cups in a shell game.
Needing to make that reveals is where the film ultimately shows the limitation of following Carpenter down his dark road. What makes Carpenter’s works so brutal is the underlying sense that trust is an exhaustible resource, and once it’s gone, all that remains is fear and pain. The endings require bleakness.
Carpenter was unafraid to take his stories to dark places, but Carnahan, for all the grit he injects into his movies, tends to show himself as ultimately an optimist regarding humanity. As dark as things can get, there needs to be some light at the end of the tunnel even if it means facing a hard truth as seen in films like “Narc” and “The Grey.” Once “The Rip” provides the answer, there’s nowhere else for it to go because the character stakes were never established in a satisfying way. The truth can’t mean anything particularly deep to any individual because the film worked so diligently to erase individuality in pursuit of prolonging the whodunnit.
This leaves “The Rip” in an awkward middle ground where it’s not eager to announce the bad guy like a ‘90s cop thriller would (huh, do you think it’s this character actor who typically plays duplicitous individuals?), but nor is it dark enough to fully embrace the Carpenter-esque origins where the lack of mutual trust carries with it a real gut-punch and sense of betrayal.
The fact that the movie can still stay entertaining enough is thanks to the performances and Carnahan’s claustrophobic camera work, which turns a mundane cul-de-sac into a particularly unnerving location. But once the film hits an answer on who you can trust, it can’t help but sputter to the end.
