Trust collapses fast in Joel Carnahan’s uneven The Rip

How do you root out a rat infestation from a house? Apparently, in Joel Carnahan’s The Rip, it can be done with an elaborate series of traps that makes occupants wary of each other.

Following the murder of police captain Jackie Velez, her Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) receives a tip-off about a house being used as a stash house for drug money.

Led by TNT’s lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), the team consisting of J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck), Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) discover well over US$20 million (RM78.08 million) in cartel money hidden within the walls.

The trust between the detectives quickly fray when they receive a threatening call to leave the house and begin suspecting each other as being not only a rat in league with corrupt police officers, but also whether the tip and the rat are tied to Jackie’s murder.

Heavy cast, thin material

The Rip is a relatively straightforward cops-and-robbers thriller and unfortunately, rather bog-standard even by Carnahan’s prior directing and writing standards. It only works because of the names attached to the film and even that is 50-50 in terms of delivery.

Damon, Affleck and Yeun carry the weight of the film on their shoulders, while Golden Globe-winner Taylor, Kyle Chandler who plays DEA agent Mateo Nix and Scott Adkins who plays FBI agent Del Byrne are wasted in one-dimensional roles.

The actors are either in The Rip for looking good on-screen or to sell the film’s escalating tension, which – credit where credit is due – culminates in a rather entertaining reveal, which is sure to delight fans of the genre, where the connective threads from all the suspicions flying around finally comes together.

But then the film just devolves into a generic shooting arcade, with one sequence coming across as a lazy take on Bourne’s fist-fighting as Damon turns another character into a punching bag in a poorly lit swamp set.

Netflix filler film

A long time ago, Martin Scorsese was attributed with introducing the concept of “One for them, one for me”, as a way for actors in Hollywood to rise in the film landscape.

Roughly, what it means is that actors will agree to starring in a commercial, often made-for-the-masses studio film, no matter how bad they think it is, in exchange for scoring favour for them to then star or be involved in more personal projects.

The Rip is likely one of those films for everyone involved. It is a genre slop made for Netflix, entertaining in its own way, but exists for the likelihood of Affleck, Damon, Yeun, Taylor and Adkins to potentially be in better projects.

For the viewer, we win either way, we get to turn The Rip on while ironing our clothes and may see these actors in bigger, more personal Netflix projects in the future.

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 The Sun Malaysia