Jeremy Saulnier goes full Rambo with his elementally satisfying thriller Rebel Ridge

Throughout his series of 21st-century suspense pictures, director Jeremy Saulnier has figured out a number of ways to tighten the screws on his characters and his audience: forcing regular folks to face down horrific violence, stranding characters in the unnerving quiet of American backwoods, exploring and exposing the impractical messiness of revenge. Saulnier kicks off Rebel Ridge with a new trick, elegant in its simplicity: observing Aaron Pierre’s face. 

The film opens following Terry Richmond (Pierre) from behind as he bikes down the road—a moment later, it becomes retroactively clear that this is a point-of-view shot—and as the camera starts to catch up with him, Saulnier cuts in to show his face, clear-eyed and determined…until a cop car approaches from behind and knocks him off his bike. Shortly thereafter, as Terry endures harassment and detainment from the cops who ran him off the road, Pierre does a terrific bit of introductory acting as his character must ride the line between politeness and resistance, doling out the latter as calmly as he can even as he realizes that he’s about to get screwed over. You can practically see him swallow his disgust as an act of self-preservation. Pierre and Saulnier generate immediate tension on dual tracks: What will happen to Terry as a Black man accosted by white cops, and how he’ll respond, both in the moment and over the course of the film.

Pierre, an English actor, is probably better-known for some prestige TV parts than his film career at the moment (although: shout-out to Mid-Sized Sedan, the rapper he played in Old, sadly not reprised as Lady Raven’s opening act this summer in Trap). He jumped into Rebel Ridge as a replacement—the better-known John Boyega dropped out of the production mid-shoot—yet there’s never a moment of doubt that he has taken full, commanding possession of this role. He’s got the stern look and piercing eyes of a man-pushed-too-far action hero, yet he never pushes Terry all the way into he-man remoteness that fetishizes silent suffering. Quite to the contrary, Saulnier’s dialogue has snap and hard-boiled wit, which Pierre is allowed to occasionally, quietly relish with a dash of mordant self-awareness. At one point, he captures an enemy and makes some arrangements for a meet-up with other antagonists over the phone. After hanging up the phone, he casually asks his temporary hostage: “I put too much sauce on that?”

It's actually just the right amount. Rebel Ridge reverses the dynamic of Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, where a man seeks bloody revenge without full preparation for what it entails. Here, Terry’s military background has prepared him for a situation he does his best to avoid, as a particularly maddening real-life legal loophole sets off one of Saulnier’s trademark chains of escalating terrors. The cops, baselessly pretending to suspect Terry of drug trafficking after knocking him off his bike, claim civil forfeiture and seize the hefty sum of cash he has on him—which he has earmarked to bail his cousin Mike out of a local jail. Mike’s crime isn’t especially dire in the scheme of things, but the clock is ticking on a prison transfer that’s going to place him in mortal danger, which makes Terry both infuriated at the injustice and terrified enough to try making a deal with the local police chief (Don Johnson). But it doesn’t matter how tightly Terry keeps a lid on his rage; the cops take his mere acknowledgment of the problem as a provocation that must be placed in check—actions that in turn, yes, push him too far.

In some ways, this is Saulnier making a streaming-service programmer, a Jack Reacher-ish action-thriller without the horrific gore or subcultural oddities of Green Room or Hold The Dark. In its broadest outlines, Rebel Ridge also resembles a Rambo movie—specifically, First Blood, the good one. (Terry’s accommodations for his stay in this small Louisiana town? The woods, naturally.) What makes it more than a skilled knock-off, greater than the sum of its controlled bursts of smoothly shot action, is the richness of details that the movie allows to pass by without comment: The way that Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a court worker who quietly tries to help Terry, stops for a post-work sno-ball, rather than a coffee or a beer; the scene where Terry briefly makes contact with Mike using a triumphant display of physical prowess; the box of donuts Terry brings along to a meeting with the cops as a gesture of magnanimity that goes far beyond what they’re owed.

These moments of humanity aren’t all immediately thwarted. When Terry and Summer continue to poke around town, they find some tiny cracks in the façade of institutional unity—but they uncover nastier forms of danger, too. As the sociological and criminal specifics of the small town fill in, Rebel Ridge looks subtly apocalyptic. Saulnier paints a landscape less barren than the Alaskan nightmare of Hold The Dark, but it’s still a vision of America that may be irrevocably broken, as supposed enforcers of the law amass armories (even if composed mostly of “less lethal” weapons) and help themselves to whatever cash they can divert to a Kafkaesque purgatory, where retrieving it will cost innocent citizens more time and money than simply giving it up as lost.

Still, Rebel Ridge isn’t a lecture on civil asset forfeiture; it’s as elementally satisfying as a great Western. That’s really the genre Saulnier lands on here, complete with a moral clarity about its violence—Terry doesn’t kill, for reasons not precisely stated but perfectly in keeping with his background as well as his pragmatism—that might strike some as insufficiently radical, especially for a filmmaker who has knowingly flirted with exploitation-movie righteousness. (Harrowing as Green Room was, there was catharsis in its choice of Nazi bad guys.) Maybe, with Rebel Ridge, Saulnier has constructed the circumstances for a tidy hero to confront a system that is evil, but, conveniently, not so encompassing that it requires soaking his hands in blood. But then, that’s the appeal of some Westerns, isn’t it? The idea, however illusory, that people can fight their way toward a modicum of genuine justice, no matter how impossible America may be to actually tame.

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Writers: Jeremy Saulnier

Starring: Aaron Pierre, AnnaSophia Robb, Don Johnson, David Denman, Emory Cohen, James Cromwell

Release Date: September 6, 2024 (Netflix)