By: Alex Tilton

The Rip is a police action / thriller starring the reliable old duo of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. And to their credit, they do a good job. In fact, the movie is overall very good. In fact, it’s so good I would be inclined to forgive a few glaring plot-holes and painfully unrealistic movie cliches…but I can’t because if the rest was so good why the hell couldn’t they get those things right?

Let me start by saying this movie was fun to watch. The story revolves around a group of Miami detectives serving a search warrant-ish document on a nondescript house in one of Miami’s satellite towns. They’re looking for drug money, and they find a literal ton of it. It becomes apparent that someone, possibly the cartel or dirty cops, are going to come for the money and kill the officers (and the homeowner) to get it. 

The meat of this movie is the tension between the officers. They’re all painfully aware that one or more of them must be dirty, but they don’t have a good bead on who that might be. This is where the movie shines. It was legitimately tense and it felt like I was watching a well-done movie in a theater, in spite of the fact that I was on my couch. The parts were all cast well, and they spared no expense on the production. Netflix usually doesn’t skimp on that.

Where it falls down is when they have to resolve this tension and provide an ending for the story. At this point a movie that was a believably tense thriller about the breakdown of trust in a deadly situation becomes a hammy, implausible, Lethal Weapon-ish affair complete with car chases and shootouts that don’t have any business in a story like this. 

And this is what irritates me about The Rip. They were doing so well right up till the end. They really did manage to keep us guessing about who the dirty cop would turn out to be, and how this would be discovered. Even the discovery was fairly well managed. But apparently the director didn’t have the confidence to end the movie along the lines it’d been going for 90% of its length. Or…it might have been studio meddling. 

It was reported by avclub.com that Matt Damon said that Netflix told him “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” Apparently they also requested a big, expensive action set-piece at the beginning of the movie to get the audience’s attention, whereas it would usually go at the end.

So, if this is what Netflix is telling them then they might have also insisted on a cliched Lethal-Weapon-ish ending, on the assumption that this is what audiences would expect. I wasn’t there and I don’t know how this actually came to be, but those are the two options I can envision. 

Either way an otherwise really good movie got hamstrung at the finish line, and it was disappointing to see. But on the whole I do recommend it. Damon and Affleck do a legitimately great job dominating the screen with their presence. I just wish they’d also dominated the ending.