That a $100 million action thriller pairing the A-list power couple Ben Affleck and Matt Damon with Smokin’ Aces (2006) director Joe Carnahan has been relegated to a Netflix-only release portends a grim reality for movie theaters — especially as the streaming giant moves to swallow Warner Bros.
Carnahan’s The Rip is the kind of mid-budget, early-2000s crime picture that once lived in theaters for a few weeks before settling into its second life as a Friday-night Blockbuster rental. Now it’s been filed straight into the algorithmic cabinet. Though no modern crime classic, it has enough craft and star wattage to deserve a little more oxygen.
The film’s inciting incident (and the true story that inspired it) begins when Desi (Sasha Calle), a young woman scraping by in her late grandmother’s house on the outskirts of Miami, reluctantly allows a tactical narcotics unit to search her home after they cite a vague “Crime Stoppers tip,” rather than insisting they return with a warrant — hardly what Ben Affleck, portraying Detective Sergeant JD Byrne, would call “wicked smaht.”
Led by Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), the team quickly discovers that Desi’s home is a clandestine stash house for cartel cash — more than $20 million. Reevaluating her life choices, Desi blurts, “Is it still too late to request a warrant?” (Yes.) “The rip,” as we learn, is Miami cop parlance for such staggering sums of illicit liquidity.
Dumars bears a tattoo on his hand that abbreviates, “Are We the Good Guys?” It’s a pertinent question when you come across a veritable fortune you have the means to plunder in private (it’s not as if the mob can file an insurance claim). Culture, as the saying goes, is how people behave when they think no one is looking. The Rip is engineered precisely to see what happens when a handful of armed men, sworn to enforce the law, realize they have stumbled into an opportunity that could erase every divorce settlement, every medical bill, every gnawing humiliation of middle-class precarity. The screenplay underscores Dumars’s particularly pitiful backstory, in which he lost his son to cancer, because it understands that temptation feeds on desperation far more readily than on avarice alone.
Protocol dictates that the team remain on site, count and document every dollar, and secure the scene. But here, time is a liability. Despite Dumars never reporting the haul (or its colossal size), a slew of armed, grubby opportunists — from criminal affiliates to corrupt local police — begin circling the house like hungry sharks. The film’s central tension crystallizes into a single question: How did word get out, and which of these teammates is the mole?
Carnahan cleverly paces The Rip as a paranoid whodunit with guns rather than a traditional police thriller. The second act is the clear high point. Dumars and his team, already under duress as they count the money, begin suspecting one another of venality and quietly forming rival allegiances. It culminates in a tense standoff between Affleck’s JD Byrne and Dumars, whose friendship does little to restrain the braying accusations that follow.
Steven Yeun is also a sharp addition as Mike Ro, another detective on the team who capably camouflages his intentions behind a reserved demeanor. In one of the film’s strongest exchanges, Dumars walks Ro outside to confront him over his suspicions. That, for a fleeting moment, it is genuinely unclear whether one of them will shoot the other speaks both to Carnahan’s direction and their respective performances.
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Its triumphs aside, the main problem with The Rip is the final act, once it reveals its hand and the central tension of not knowing the traitor’s identity dissipates, the film loses much of what made it compelling, devolving into a generic highway car-chase thriller that feels perfectly at home in Netflix’s mass-market catalogue.
In that spirit, The Rip is an inoffensive (occasionally even genuinely gripping) action flick, buoyed by its cast and sustained, for a while, by Carnahan’s knack for keeping you unsure of whom you can trust. It’s perfectly watchable, and in this brave new world of streaming exclusives, you don’t even have to leave the couch.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
