Rebel Ridge: Far Better Than I Expected

To set the record completely straight, I expected Rebel Ridge to be at its very best a perfectly serviceable action flick that would make a good addition to Netflix's arsenal of many other perfectly serviceable action flicks. I figured that it might be a good throwback to the days of those cheesy 80's one-man-army films, and function as something I could enjoy watching while also acting as passable cinema. And being a critic who likes to grade like a school teacher, with anything below a six out of ten being a failing grade, I thought that this film would be, at best, just enough to pass my theoretical class without really impressing me too much. And so, I was kind of shocked when this movie turned out to be a genuinely surprising and well-balanced thriller with a lot more on its mind than mere action pulp. Rebel Ridge is sincerely a great movie and pays homage to both Westerns and classic action movies while also functioning distinctly as it's own entity. Its plotting is largely really well done and well-paced, with each scene and plot thread generally building effectively on the one that came before, and rarely wasting time that it instead chooses to use to develop the plot. And the character dynamics are interesting ones that, while nothing insane to write home about, accomplished the job set before them in a satisfying manner. In short, it really surprised me, and this review is going to be a lot more positive than I had estimated when I first sat down to watch this film.

Rebel Ridge, a Netflix original film released in September of 2024, is an action thriller set in a small Louisiana town that follows Terry Richmond, a Marine Corps veteran who gets in a violent confrontation with corrupt small-town police after some officers illegally seize money he was going to use to bail his brother Mike out of jail.

First off, Rebel Ridge wastes absolutely no time in establishing the conflict that its story is centered around, and I appreciate a film that doesn't self-indulge. The goals of Terry are quickly established, and the conflict is immediately laid out from the very, very beginning of this movie. Of course, it rightfully takes some time before really kicking the conflict into a higher gear, but it lays out the problem our characters are facing from the very start. It's a really good example of tight writing, and soon after, things get complicated when Terry runs into a series of altercations creating varying and escalating degrees of frustration with the local police and their corrupt ways of running Shelby Springs, a fictional town in Louisiana that I can only assume was steered away from being entirely real due to the filmmakers wanting to avoid potential fallout courtesy of real-life officers of the law. Rebel Ridge does something we as filmmakers like to call "kill the darlings" really well. In short, that term means to remove story aspects that aren't entirely necessary. The goal of killing your darlings should be to streamline your story, and this film initially has a good grasp of the concept, avoiding long expository sequences and keeping the storyline effectively simple, at least until the second half of the first act, which is definitely the weakest part of this movie for me, and that would be because here, Rebel Ridge becomes too worried about legalities, and starts to take it's merry time establishing details of the budding conflict between Terry and the local PD when it could have and should have exposited the story beats in question here more quickly than it did. However, other than picking a strange place to end the story, I didn't find any other major errors in this movie's writing, and liked the obvious narrative intelligence on display here. Even if some of the first act of the film does unnecessarily stretch out aspects of Rebel Ridge, I do want to say that I largely appreciate the film's surprising amount of quiet moments. It's not a full-blooded, unapologetically action-packed movie, and sometimes, it even acts more like a conspiracy movie than it does an action flick, which certainly contributed to its effective sense of plot development, and I appreciate that it trusted itself enough not to try and lean on non-stop action sequences. There's also the narrative cherry on top of a periodically effective sense of setup and payoff, and I was genuinely surprised by some of the attention to detail that I saw here. But as I mentioned, I personally wasn't huge on the film's ending, primarily because it almost entirely lacked a falling action, but to be completely honest with you, that's fine, even if the film didn't really give us any time to sit on and process everything that had happened.

Everything considered, the pacing of Rebel Ridge is the best and most important thing about it and builds toward the eventual climax effectively by employing tropes of both conspiracy movies and action movies to great effect. It's a nice throwback to the days of uncomplicated one-man-army films from the 1980s while also employing a lot of contemporary filmmaking tactics to balance out any stereotypical posturing that could have easily arisen in a film like this. The plotting is largely a really major win, minus the temporary expositional sequences in the first act. The visual style of this film often looks a lot like a Netflix piece, and never quite feels special, but doesn't exactly look bad, even if I did find myself wishing that the film was willing to be less bare-bones when it came to its production design. But outside of some minor narrative flaws and a visual aesthetic that left some to be desired, I have virtually no complaints. I know I devoted more word count to talking about the film's flaws than I did its strengths, but this is mostly due to the fact that the flaws in the film are more specific than its strengths, because this film finds what works, and then just runs with those aspects throughout it's entire runtime. Rebel Ridge is ultimately far better than I expected it to be and maybe even more than it deserved to be, and I count myself sincerely surprised. If you're looking for a nice, old-fashioned, grounded action flick, this is one I would happily point you towards.

Rebel Ridge - 9/10

1 Peter 2:16