The Rip
The Rip is a deeply simulacric movie, not just in the Netflix action thriller sense, but also in the sense of it largely existing in the context of all the cliches, a word I do not deploy derogatorily (yet), in front of it:
- our understanding as filmgoers of Matt and Ben's dynamic,
- our understanding of every single Miami drug film that came before it,
- our understanding of the way these potboiler films in general were.
It is a deeply derivative film, but does us the mercy of being derivative in occasionally interesting ways.
Affleck's performance is, I think, the weaker of the two, playing what oftentimes is a caricature of John Bernthal's shtick in We Own This City. Damon does a good job imbuing the film with wit and a sense of ambiguity, and his performance of a man who only barely has the situation under control is the bright spot — especially in contrast to the rest of his cast, who are very excited to collect that Netflix money and move on.
The third act of the film lays everything bare and throws into sharp relief the weaknesses of Netflix's production process. You could otherwise almost have multiple characters explain the plot of the film that you've just watched in its entirety. And if that weren't enough, you get gratuitous blown-up flashbacks to scenes you've already seen 30 minutes prior to drive the point home. Not every film needs to be awash in subtext, but there's something so aggressive about the way this film is not content until it goes around in a circle as every actor says exactly what their intentions are and exactly what had happened, just in case you were too busy folding laundry in the other room to really pick up on it.
Combined with an anarchic and pointless 10-minute action scene to cap the movie off, it degraded from enjoyable pablum to actively being a bummer of a watch. You could have created a version of this movie, maybe 20 years ago, that was not exactly a masterpiece but had a soul and a rightful cult following in the same way Michael Mann's films do, despite their flaws.
Maybe that's the movie Damon and Affleck wanted to make, but it's not the one they made. Instead, we are left with The Rip.