‘Rebel Ridge’ Review: Aaron Pierre Shines in Jeremy Saulnier’s Best Film
Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson fiercely lead the action thriller Rebel Ridge, which marks director Jeremy Saulnier’s best film yet.
Director Jeremy Saulnier does not reinvent the wheel with Rebel Ridge, a lean and mean action thriller that will easily be compared to Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood, in which corrupt police officers attempt to prevent an Army veteran from returning to their town, and tensions escalate. In this case, the Army veteran is Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), and the corrupt police officer is Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson).
One morning, Terry is riding his bicycle and gets hit by a police car. These are officers working in Sandy’s scheme, as they seize his cash and accuse him of being a drug dealer, while his hard-earned money would be used to post bail for his cousin, currently locked up in jail and on his way to be transferred to a dangerous location. Terry, at first, respects the police, acquiesces to their demands, and is arrested. However, when this arrest makes far less sense than it initially did, and his money is never recovered, Terry takes matters into his own hands to make things right.
Meanwhile, court clerk Summer McBride (played by AnnaSophia Robb, when was the last time we saw her in something? Talk about a blast from the past!) unearths evidence of a conspiracy within the police department, but is constantly shut down by a judge (James Cromwell) working in Sandy’s pocket, while the people around her look the other way. When Terry arrives to court, the two form an alliance to take down not only Sandy, but the entire Shelby Springs Police Department.
What Sandy doesn’t know is how meticulous Terry is. A practitioner of MCMAP, the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, he utilizes tactile hand-to-hand, non-lethal combat to subdue his assailants. As the tobacco-chewing police chief gives Terry his famous shit eating grin, in a confrontation worthy of S. Craig Zahler’s brilliant Brawl in Cell Block 99, the Marine Corps veteran jumps to the letter ‘E’ of his PACE Plan (Primary, Alternate, Contingency…I’ll let you figure out what ‘E’ means) and vows to bring them all to justice.
Saulnier smartly builds the tension by firstly introducing audiences to Terry in media res before the accident occurs. It immediately gives us an idea of who he is, while also slowly revealing the bigger picture regarding the police department’s corrupt operations. He gives us a character to root for, with tangible motivations for wanting to get his money back. When Sandy tricks him into visiting his cousin, to which he ultimately sees him while biking like the best athlete in history to reach his prison bus, giving him a fist bump, you can tell he loves him deeply and only wants to see him alive and safe.
But when the inevitable occurs, as much as he’s warned everyone in the police department, and the court, that he needs to get him out, Terry snaps. Of course, it isn’t as stark as Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo in First Blood. In fact, Terry never fully breaks down in front of Sandy and the other police officers. He just knows something’s up, and no one is willing to do anything to stop them from ruining the lives of so many.
In one of the film’s most frightening sequences, a calculated Terry notices that Officer Steve Lann (Emory Cohen) did not turn on his siren before pulling him over. He tells him, with a cold and unforgiving voice, “These new cruisers, you run the lights…the dash cam starts recording.” He knows what he’s doing only benefits his pocket, while he has no problem tarnishing the reputation of honorable individuals for their own monetary gain. If the dash cam doesn’t record any activity, then their crimes can be swept under the rug. It’s also where the movie raises its intensity, as the police have no problem planting evidence and even drug people digging into their operation to shut them up.
Aaron Pierre’s piercing eyes give incredible emotional complexity to Terry. The role was initially slated to be portrayed by John Boyega, who left the movie due to creative differences as production was underway. But there couldn’t have been a better actor to showcase the torment in Terry’s eyes quite like Pierre, whose silent anger speaks far louder than the strategic words and “less lethal” hits he gives Sandy’s police department to. He shares electric chemistry with Robb, giving the best turn of her career, a welcomed return to a once-promising child actor who sadly never got her time to fully shine in the spotlight.
Of course, Johnson is expectedly menacing as Sandy, immediately harkening back to Cell Block’s Warden Tuggs. Though he’s got less of a cartoonish presentation to his police character than he did in Cell Block, but these two characters share distinct similarities that it becomes hard not to compare. Johnson is very well at ease here, and no one else could make us root for this piece of shit’s demise quite like him. How he calmly gaslights and manipulates Terry, while subtly insulting him, is a real tour-de-force moment in how he loves playing characters like these. He may not be as complex as Terry, but he’s definitely not an uninteresting villain.
Saulnier captures this with a rigid aesthetic, tightly blocked action gives it intense texture, while scenes in the dark are perhaps too underlit. However, how he realizes MCMAP techniques on screen with such thrilling precision, feels like an achievement in and of itself. We’ve seen so many martial arts treated on the screen through various filmmakers with different aesthetic sensibilities. We’ve never seen MCMAP highlighted this way, and how it immediately shocks you with its intense bursts of strong tactility equally thrills the audience watching Terry dispatch as many people as possible without firing a single lethal weapon.
Rebel Ridge’s ending may prove divisive, as Saulnier’s ACAB stance is put to the test when some think Sandy is going too far. But it also makes us think of the power of human individuals to do the right thing, even if institutions of power can be, and are, in many cases, absolutely corrupted. Above all else, police officers are human, as much as they continuously make terrible, inhuman decisions that benefit them, and not the people they hurt. But it takes one person to stand up to the injustices perpetrated by people who only care about “Me, Myself and I,” and when one acts as the catalyst and showcases everyone else a better way forward, it doesn’t take long for others to join them.