One of the most promising American directors of recent times, Jeremy Saulnier made a name for himself thanks to violent, dark and intense police films like BLUE RUIN (2013) o GREEN ROOM (2015). Now closer in time, his thriller HOLD THE DARK (2018) was a slight disappointment, but his thrillers are always anticipated with greater anticipation than most films in the genre, especially those that are released directly via streaming platform. And REBEL RIDGEalthough it is not up to the level of his two best-known films (there is an earlier one, a horror comedy entitled MURDER PARTY (which I didn’t see) marks a return to what he does best: those small-town crime films that have a lot of modern western feel to them.
Throughout its more than two hours, REBEL RIDGE It goes through several paths and tones, but perhaps the main one is one that links it to the Howard Hawks/John Carpenter line of films like RIO BRAVO o ASSAULT ON PRECINT 13. While it is not, like those, a film that develops all its tensions around a police station or detachment, that may be its main setting, one to which the film returns more than once, as if it could not free itself from its reckless pull. It is a police station in a small town –Shelby Springs, Louisiana– and what happens there will change the protagonist’s life, from one day to the next.
It all starts when Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, from THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD) is riding a bicycle along a road and is hit by a police car. The reason? According to them, because he was wearing headphones and listening to music at high volume, he didn’t hear them when they stopped him. Excuses come and go, but the truth is that they end up taking $36,000 in cash from his bag. Terry explains that $10,000 is to get his cousin out of jail – where he is for possession of marijuana – and the rest is his savings with which he intends to start a business with him. The police, realizing the possibility of making easy money, keep the money as “evidence” of suspicious activity and set him free.
It’s obvious that Terry won’t find it easy to recover the money, but his problem is that he needs it urgently, since his cousin will be transferred to another prison where his life is in danger. That’s why he makes a risky decision, which is to go to the police station in question and try to negotiate so that they return at least the bail money, promising not to make any claim for the rest. There he runs into Commissioner Sandy Burnne (the unbreakable Don Johnson), a rather unscrupulous guy who appears to accept the agreement but then backs out and raises the stakes even higher. What he doesn’t know is that Terry is a guy “prepared” for this type of situation and that, realizing that his negotiating phase will not achieve anything, he decides to go even further and declare something like war on him.
That will be the initial approach on which Saulnier bases himself, but which will later change considerably in relation to the classic models. In parallel, a woman named Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) who works in the justice system tries to help him, the circumstances linked to his imprisoned cousin change and the plot takes, halfway through the story, an unexpected turn that expands the issue of personal revenge to a possibly serious case of widespread police corruption. Seeing the carriage and the attitudes of Johnson and his team of officers, there is little doubt that these guys are in somewhat bigger business than taking the money of some jerk they meet on the road.
The paradox of Saulnier’s film is that, when it starts to become more complex and to delve deeper into the systems of corruption and the relationships that a series of characters in the town have with them, it loses a certain rhythm and intensity. It is, yes, more disturbing in terms of its narrative connections and profound in terms of its content, but that simpler and more direct energy, almost Rambo-style, that it has at the beginning, fades a little. And to pick it up again, the film takes a long time to recover, as if the first episode of a series were ending to give way to a second.
Something similar happens with the settings. Everything is built around a more or less unique location, with the consequent tension, hostage-taking, violence and betrayals, but the film leaves it aside sooner than expected, only to return there much later. It is not necessarily a problem – there are not so many or rich characters to sustain almost two hours of film in a police station – but what this decision does generate is a series of breaks, a lack of apparent continuity, in the narrative structure.
Still, Saulnier has enough talent and enough control of tension – his films are always darker than average, cinematically speaking – to wake up his own film when it seems to enter a narrative rut of those plagued by specific information that, in the long run, do not change things much. After all, the specific details regarding what the commissioner and his people do in that small town are not too important, it is a McGuffin to drive the narrative. What matters, in the end, is the same as in good westerns from the 1950s onwards: whether or not civilization – or something resembling it – triumphs over barbarism.
