The Rip – Review

Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 53 minutes, Director – Joe Carnahan

After discovering much more money than expected in what’s believed to be a stash house, a narcotics team experience rising tensions against paranoia that one of their own is setting them up for their own gain.

Since being labelled as a sort-of double act there’s grown an expectation that a project that sees Matt Damon and Ben Affleck together on-screen will have a sense of fun. The Rip sets out to flip this idea on its head with an ultra-serious police thriller about suspicion and corrupt cops. The pair, in the roles of lieutenant and detective sergeant respectively, circle each other and their fellow narcotics detectives, a team who are less back-up and more the film’s substance, suspecting that one of them is behind the murder of a fellow officer and is attempting to set up the rest of the team with the current operation.

That operation is the discovery of stashed-away drug money which turns out to be a few million more than the couple of hundred thousand expected. With the homeowner (Sasha Calle) tied up the team – which also includes Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun and Catalina Sandino Moreno – get to work counting and trying to get to the bottom of the situation, with other departments often adding to the tension. As fingers are indirectly pointed and suspicions rise there’s a rising tension to be found as Carnahan turns the heat up on the characters, largely containing them in the house with conflicting back and forths.

While sold on the two macho, bearded leads (who also produce), with Affleck turning in a performance that maintains the over-seriousness of the film before we arrive at the home of Calle’s Desiree, it’s the interactions and uncertainty of the supporting cast who manage to spin the film into what it is. Creating an engaging throwback thriller which largely contains its characters and tension. Although occasionally leaking out into the street, one scene involving Damon and Yeun walking in the middle of the road is successfully suspenseful the longer it goes on, with help from Clinton Shorter’s rising strings.

However, when things completely move outside there’s a far less contained nature to the film. It tries to barrel along but amongst its developments gets caught under the weight of keeping track of its own narrative and in doing so takes itself too seriously again. It dampens the tension and overall enjoyment there is to be had from what is otherwise a well worked on paranoid thriller, set against backdrop themes of modern corrupt cops – our introductions to the characters and their ways of working aren’t for making us like them, they’re for making them all seem like they could be the one working against the team and bringing the police a bad name.

When focusing on this there’s a well-constructed film at play, and one that rises a good deal above the initial impressions. Unfortunately, things are knocked back, although not to a point of dullness, when the film tries to reach grander, more twisty levels that feel as if they have to match the visual darkness of the piece rather than complimenting them in a more contained space and atmosphere.

When largely contained to one area there’s a rising tension to The Rip that makes for a gripping paranoid thriller made by its supporting cast. When outside of that environment it dampens its effect with a brooding atmosphere that takes itself too seriously.