4 out of 5

Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier

From the tagline – “Their laws. His rules” – to the painted poster which pits stars Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson against one another, to its battlefront-tinged title, Rebel Ridge sets itself up as a certain type of movie. With the opening setting a precedent of smalltown Shelbyville, Lousiana cops hassling visitor Terry (Pierre), biking his way into their jurisdiction, we’re further brought to think of films / genres each review of the film has mentioned: Rambo; Westerns. Rebel Ridge is that type of movie, and those references are warranted.

However, writer / director Jeremy Saulnier loves a slow burn, and Terry’s “rules” prove to swerve towards the lawful, straight-forward way of things, when everyone else in Shelbyville would seem to prefer we aim towards anarchy instead. The irony is that this is all housed under de-escalation: the police take Terry’s property (which turns out to be a hefty sum of cash, needed for plot reasons) under it being suspected as related to a crime – called civil forfeiture – and give him a long-winded runaround as to how he can get this property back. This is an “official” process, which Terry does his best to abide by, except for butting up against the lunacy of the rules at every step, which are certainly being exacerbated by the police, led by chief Sandy Burnne (Johnson). There are multiple opportunities for a film like Rebel Ridge to let Terry unload against this system and its perpetrators – the more savage variant would be physically, but at the very least in a “you pushed me too far” style flick, you’d get some verbal sparring – but he doesn’t. He’s not exactly calm, but he’s very controlled, and keeps pushing wherever he can push. This leads him to some guidance from court clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), who indicates there’s more to this story… but, again rather fighting against the usual current of such tales, Terry just wants his money back. And Saulnier – editing to a perfectly tense pace; guiding his actors to fully embody their roles and fill their screentime – keeps ratcheting this back and forth up. Even when we finally get to where we think the line is, in a brilliantly staged Terry / Brunne squaring off, we get an amazing payoff that still keeps dialing back, and kicking up that tension even more.

Perhaps inevitably in a 2+ hour film, this is a hard balance to maintain. The film’s midsection, which lays out the intrigue that’s occurring in Shelbyville, requires some story-pokes and retreats, which move both quick and slow, dropping intriguing concepts in succinct sentences, but also trying to massage out the relationships to justify Terry’s eventual Rambo / Western turn. At the same time, Terry gets one liners, and some badass action sequences; mapping some of this together with the more serious elements is where the film has some hiccups.

Thankfully, Saulnier has such control of his frame and pacing that every scene moves well, even if in retrospect there could be some tightening, and across the board, the actors amaze – though Pierre in particular is mesmerizing, and Don Johnson proves that doing TV fluff like Doctor Odyssey hasn’t dimmed his ability to capture our attentions in more grounded projects.

Rebel Ridge is, perhaps, Saulnier’s most accessible flick, as it’s not as genre-y or notably indie as his previous entries, and like all of his movies up to this point – it’s both about a lot, and yet doesn’t have to be about a lot. You can dig in to the silences; stew over what’s blatantly said and then very not said about the justice system. Or you can just buckle in and enjoy the movie as one of the best shot thrillers of the past few years.