There's a moment in Rebel Ridge where ex-Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) ends a phone call to his adversaries with a threat that would send a chill up anyone's spine. He takes a beat, looks at a cop he's holding captive, and asks, deadpan, "I put too much sauce on that?"
The audience, like Terry, knows there's only one right answer: Nope, you used the exact right amount.
The same goes for Rebel Ridge, which is filled to the brim with cinematic sauce. Packing shades of Rambo's First Blood, as well as director Jeremy Saulnier's other films, like Blue Ruin and Green Room, Rebel Ridge is a monster of a thriller that thrives on perfectly calibrated tension — and on dissecting the injustices at the heart of America's justice and policing systems.
Rebel Ridge opens with a foreboding image: A police car prowls behind Terry as he bikes toward the town of Shelby Springs. With Iron Maiden blaring in his ears, he doesn't realize he's being tailed until the cops ram him off the road.
While unspoken, the threat of police brutality against Black men hangs over the ensuing traffic stop. Terry spends much of the sequence trapped in the back of the cop car, while white officers Evan Marston (David Denman) and Steve Lann (Emory Cohen) roam around freely, looking down at Terry from the outside. There's a real sense of claustrophobia from Terry's perspective, highlighting a power imbalance that only grows more skewed as the scene plays out.
Marston and Lann find $36,000 in cash in Terry's bag, some of which Terry intends to use to post bail for his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc), who's headed to prison for weed possession. Terry explains that the rest of the money will help him and Mike start a boat-hauling business. The cops confiscate the cash anyway, claiming that it's drug money. Without the cash, and with the clock ticking until Mike's prison transfer, Terry tries to bring his case to police chief Sandy Burnne (a spectacularly slimy Don Johnson). But as it becomes clear how corrupt Sandy and his cronies are, Terry realizes that the only way he'll get his money back is by taking matters into his own hands.
As the Shelby Springs police department quickly learns, Terry is a force in his own right. In a sequence that's as suspenseful as it is darkly humorous, the cops discover that Terry was a martial arts instructor for the Marines, and that he could probably take any of them out in two seconds if he was so inclined. Lucky for them, he's not... yet. Early action scenes involving Terry see him trying to de-escalate conflict and avoid collateral damage, a choice that's on par with his training. Don't expect any Green Room-level box cutter shenanigans from Saulnier here, although there's still much pleasure to be had in Terry's cool, efficient style of combat.
Over the course of Rebel Ridge, though, the powers that be in Shelby Springs will push Terry to more extreme measures. The police department, rife with racism, antagonizes him at every turn. Indifferent officials at City Hall turn away from his pleas for help. Only law clerk Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb) is willing to help — especially when her work on Mike's case begins to uncover a town-wide conspiracy.
From here, Saulnier spins a tale that goes beyond Terry's attempts to help Mike, showing how everyone in Shelby Springs is impacted by — or complicit in — the cops' scheming. Basically, if you didn't know much about civil asset forfeiture before watching Rebel Ridge, you're going to know a lot about it by the end of the film — and be livid about it!
Terry and Summer's thorough unspooling of Shelby Springs' dark secrets builds nicely to spurts of explosive action, including a pulse-pounding shootout at a police station. There isn't as much fighting in Rebel Ridge as trailers may have you believe — this is definitely a quality over quantity situation — but they're informed so much by the investigative work that came before them that they still pack a mighty punch. Plus, as we see right from Terry's first interaction with the cops, Saulnier has a knack for wringing the most tension from any dialogue-heavy scene, so that every exchange will send you to the edge of your seat.
At the heart of Rebel Ridge is Aaron Pierre's remarkable performance, one that's part action hero, part negotiator. He's the very definition of commanding as the often soft-spoken — but never meek — Terry. A taut intensity burns through his every word, unleashing itself when Terry finally gets physical with the people who have wronged him. Even then, Pierre's execution of Rebel Ridge's action is remarkably calm and calculated. He's a one-man army who won't be denied.
Pierre is also strikingly funny when he needs to be. Take the aforementioned sauce line, or a moment when he fakes Sandy out with a truce proposal, then hits him with a no-nonsense, "nah." If overdone in another performer's hands, these badass one-liners could risk undermining Rebel Ridge's exquisitely built tension. Instead, Pierre's delivery both breaks the tension just enough for a laugh, yet continues to build it with the promise that Terry is not a guy to be messed with. This is a star-making performance, pure and simple, and Pierre — who's done remarkable work in projects like The Underground Railroad — deserves to go straight to the stratosphere following this film.
So too, does Rebel Ridge, which checks all the boxes any thriller aficionado could possibly want, and then some. Full of action and crackling dialogue that'll leave you buzzing, and enough real-world issues to leave you fuming, Rebel Ridge cements itself as one of standout action films of the year.
