Rebel Ridge

A Black man and former Marine finds himself caught up in the racist and corrupt reality of law enformcement in America, when small town cops unjustly seize his money before he can use it post his cousin's bail.

Rebel Ridge is the fifth film by writer/director Jeremy Saulnier. Known for making films that feature darkly humorous, very violent, and realistically grimy feels, ones that are usually coupled with an especially unpredicatable kind of story, I'll always turn out for his stuff.

His previous four films were...

Murder Party is a 2007 low budget horror-comedy about a lonely meter maid who finds an invitation on the street to a Halloween party called a "Murder Party" and decides to go. He quickly discovers that not only is the name on the flyer a literal description of the evening's events, but as the random stranger who decided to attend, he's the special guest/target for the festivities.

Murder Party is fun. It's obviously an early low budget effort, but still fun.

Blue Ruin is a 2013 kickstarter-funded revenge-thriller about a emotionally-broken drifter, living out of his car, who returns to his hometown in order to finally kill the man who is responsible for murdering his parents 20 years ago, when that man is released from prison. But when things go a bit awry in the attempt, he soon finds the man's family to be hunting him, looking for revenge.

Blue Ruin is a simply incredible film. So unbelievably tense. I loved this movie. Big thumbs up. You should absolutely check this one out.

Green Room is a 2015 horror-thriller about a punk band on a shoestring tour who find themselves holed up in the green room of an isolated club in the Pacific Northwest, beseiged by a gang of murderous neo-Nazi skinheads, after the band witnesses one of the skinheads commit a murder.

Green Room is easily Saulnier's best film. Easily. Violent, scary, and completely unpredicatable, all with an undeniable feeling of authenticity running through it, this film is all-around fantastic. I absolutely loved it. This is definitely a highly recommended watch from me.

Hold the Dark is a 2018 action-thriller based on the novel of the same name by William Giraldi, about a woman who summons naturalist and wolf expert Russell Core to hunt down the wolves responsible for the disappearance of her 6-year-old son, only for Core to discover that there's a much darker evil waiting for him in the cold forests of the Alaskan wilderness.

Hold The Dark ultimately doesn't quite land for me, but it still has some incredible moments in it that made it worth watching, at least for me.

But back to the subject at hand... Rebel Ridge.

Jeremy Saulnier loves a pretty straight-forward good vs. evil set-up, and Rebel Ridge is no different, telling what basically amounts to a “realistic-ish” version of that classic action movie story that we've all seen a bunch of times in such films as First Blood or John Wick. Basically: “Some assholes made the bad decision to fuck with someone they thought was just a nobody, but it turns out that person was actually a bad-ass motherfucker, and now… shit's about to get real.”

The film opens with Terry Richmond getting knocked off his bicycle when the cop car tailing him deliberately rams into his back wheel. After that, the cops do what they have always done, and proceed to do their utmost to ruin Terry's day simply because he exists, and that really bothers them. In the end, unable to find a reason to truly fuck him up, they settle on seizing the sizable amount of money that Terry has on him–money that he could prove was legally his, money that he intended to use to post his cousin's bail, and to then buy a truck that they would use to start a new business–but the cops claim they're seizing the money due to a suspicion of it being drug money. The cops do this, because Civil Forfeiture is a real-life process that cops abuse regularly every day, all over this country, and also because these cops are bigots and assholes, a fact that seems a little unnecessary for me to point out, as I have already stated that they're cops.

So, having been wronged, and despite the fact that standing in his way is the assembled might of the entire local backwoods police department–a gaggle of fatuous and lumbering dullards, each one seemingly indistinguisable from the next, with their shitty little goatees, ridiculous amount of overly-expensive battle-rattle, and beady little porcine eyes sunk low in the fleshy expanses of their pale moonpie faces–Terry is still determined to reclaim what is his. So, with the help of a friendly law clerk, well... like I said... shit is about to get real.

The plot of Rebel Ridge turns on two very real life realities...

Systemic racism and Civil Forfeiture.

Systemic Racism is the foundation upon which America was built from the very first moment ships full of unwashed European bandits, rapists, and reavers–all of whom were sent by their greedy and inbred kings and queens–first stepped foot on the sandy shores of this continent. Systemic Racism refers to the oppression of a racial group (anyone who isn't white) to the advantage of another racial group (everyone who is white) as perpetuated by the inequity baked into interconnected political, economic, and social systems. This is a reality that becomes harder to ignore when you realize that today’s police officers all work within a system that originally began as slave patrols. Dating back to the late 1600s, white citizens were encouraged to patrol their areas and round up any suspected escaped slaves and to them return them to their masters. Fast forward to the present, where a modern day police officer's primary function is to protect the wealthy and the privileged, and in return, the system then protects them from any consequences of the abuses and the harms they inflict on poor and marginalized communities in the course of their duties.

In short, today's system isn't broken, it's acting exactly as designed. In the words of the American writer Ijeoma Oluo, "Systemic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We have to actually dismantle the machine if we want to make change."

Civil Forfeiture, meanwhile, sometimes referred to as Civil Asset Forfeiture, is a legal process that allows the government to file cases against property that would otherwise not be reachable through criminal forfeiture, things like the property of fugitives, terrorists, and other criminals who are located outside the United States. Civil forfeiture allows the police to seize—and to then keep or sell—any property that is allegedly involved in a crime. The owners of the property do not need to be arrested, or even convicted of a crime for their cash, their cars, or their real estate to be permanently taken away by the government. Originally intended as a way to go after large-scale criminal enterprises, today, police departments are often seen using forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated by profit rather than crime-fighting. For the people whose property has been seized, the process to regain that property is usually very difficult and very expensive, often costing more than the value of the property itself. Like so many things in this country, while it was possibly once meant as a well-intentioned tool, it has since then been eagerly and irrevocably co-opted by the powerful and the privileged for their own use as a legally-sanctioned scam.

This is but one of the many ways that modern day law enforcement, especially sheriff and police departments around this country, harm the communities they claim to protect and serve. And while Civil Forfeiture is a constant target of reform efforts, those efforst continually fail due to resistance from both law enforcement organizations, as well as the politicians who use the threat of the police, and the fear of "urban" crime, to curry favor amongst their ignorant, racist, and virulently xenophobic voters. It is just one more thing for the pile of proof that shows that not only is police reform an absolute necessity if we want to have a better society, but it also illustrates how Law Enforcement itself is what renders the very idea of reform to be impossible.

Because of this reality, we are left with only one option... the complete dissolution of Law Enforcement as it exists today, as well as the culture it fosters, including the firing, investigation, and potential prosecution of every LEO member, and then scattering them all to the wind, all while barring them from ever holding a position of authority ever again, especially an armed one.

Obviously, this seems like a ridiculous impossibility, right?

But the only reason you believe that is because of the constant stream of copaganda that permeates every aspect of our society, especially in pop culture. You only have this ignorant knee-jerk reaction because of the constant reminder on the news and in pop culture of the horde of vicious "urban" criminals out there, just waiting to get you, and that the Hero Cop and the "Thin Blue Line" is all that stands between you and those monsters out there "in the dark." The worst part is when you realize that you only believe this because of the deeply ingrained racism we were all raised with, that bigot bullshit and xenophobic nonsense that White and Christian was the "norm," that it was the zero point, and that everything else is some kind of deviation, the crap that we were all taught was absolute turth from a very young age, and that this profound and entitled ignorance is what colors the entire worldview of our White American Culture.

Once you see that, then the truth becomes clear...

Our only hope for a better world is to tear all this shit down completely, down to the studs. Then we can rebuild the whole thing with an eye more towards public service, and less towards a system of personal violence-concierges beholden to the authoritarian whims of White Supremacy. Of course, this means we have to stop focusing our police recruitment efforts on the dumbest kids you went to high school with, or the most ate-up wanna-be soldiers you served with, and really just turn away every angry little asshole with a crewcut, a painfully erect little murder-boner, and a military gear fetish.

But so many people love to blow this off, to ignore it, and to simply shrug and say: "One bad apple..." whenever a cop is caught doing the things they normally do, like breaking the law, or beating their spouses. But very notably, they never finish the actual proverb–first popularized in “The Cook’s Tale,” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–which is: "One bad apple spoils the bunch." This means the same thing as the joke: "What do you call 11 people and 1 Nazi at the same table? 12 Nazis having lunch." They both mean that...

You can't be a "good one" when you're allowing the "bad ones" to hang out too.

This leads into my one big complaint for this film, and that is the way it portrays some of the cops as 11th hour good guys, despite their actions, like they don't mind doing a little crime, but they have limits, right? Even the big reveal of the ultimate reason behind the cops' actions is an excuse, just a little bit of "there's no black and white here, just gray," just in case you wanted a little squirt of poop atop your cake.

This doesn't surprise me, but it is a bit disappointing to see here.

I obviously know that in real life, individuals are nuanced and multi-faceted, but this is a movie, it's fictional, and every character and moment is deliberate, and reveals an intent on the behalf of the author. So this last minute redemption is just more of the typical bullshit we get in this country, especially from White America, just more of the usual "both side-ism" where SOME people like to venerate their refusal to confront bigotry, their refusal to clean up their own houses, to hold up the fact that they allow bigots and Nazis into their social circles as if this makes them a more evolved person, a more tolerant person, and a true lover of diversity, as if they are being someone who provides a space for "all opinions," as if it doesn't actually mean that they're just enabling the most cruel and the most entitled.

It's just more of the same, and at a certain point, it's fair to wonder if these people keep doing this kind of shit, keep making these excuses for the bigots, instead of confronting and ostracizing them, simply because they prefer the company of racists and White supremacists...?

It's exhausting.

But I digress...

To his credit, Terry does try to work within the law, at least at first. He tries to keep his head down, to accept reality, and use the system as it is, so that he can get him and his cousin free of this whole mess, and then get the fuck outta dodge.

He first tries to file a complaint with the police, which honestly seems a little naive, but hey, he gave it a shot. But then, when he sees that it's the entire department, he tries to make an under-the-table deal with the cops: "Let me post my cousin's bail, you can keep the rest of the money, and we'll disappear."

Of course, the cops aren't interested in any of that shit, because they just don't have to be. Not only is the law on their side to keep it all, when it comes to people like this, their end goal, like so many other things in this country, is all or nothing. "Me first, me second, you never. Our way, or we fucking kill you." Terry knows this is how shit goes, of course, he's a Black man in America, but still, like I said, to his credit, he at least tries to work this shit out, to get the best he can out of it, then cut his losses and move on. After all, like the song says... you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.

Which is why things end up in the place they do. No matter how much Terry tries to resolve things, there's just too many roadblocks and too many obstinate fuckers standing in his way. So, like in First Blood, they pushed it, so Terry has no choice but to give them a war that they won't believe.

Y'see, the reason for Terry's easy assurance, and for his no-nonsense intensity, not to mention his obvious competency, is because his military background has taught him to make a plan, and to then do whatever it takes to complete it. Because, much like the Steven Seagal classic Under Siege, where the ship's cook turned out to be a totally convincing Navy Seal, where the cops only see a person of color and a drifter, back in the Marines, Terry was an MCMAP instructor. MCMAP stands for Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. It's a USMC-developed combat system that focuses on close quarters hand-to-hand combat, training Marines in the art of unarmed combat, the use of edged weapons, and also in the use of "weapons of opportunity," which basically means using anything at hand to beat the snot out of someone.

Its motto is: “One Mind. Any Weapon.”

Basically, it turns out that Terry came to town for two things... to post his cousin's bail, and to kick some cracker cop ass, and it's too late to post bail...

There's no shortage of films about soldiers whose wartime experiences leave them out of step with the civilian world once they return home from the battlefield, and these are often used either for an empathetic and emotional exploration of how deep the scars of war can go, or for a whole bunch of kicking ass and taking names. Echoing ’80s action movies and old Westerns, with Terry as the familiar stranger, a man who just happened to ride into the wrong town, cross the wrong path, and ended up getting pushed too far, Rebel Ridge is a little from Column A and a little from Column B. Maybe more from Column B than Column A, sure, but either way, it's a great little John Wick-flavored genre thriller with the kind of action that is at once both jaw-dropping, but could also maybe be called at least somewhat “realistic" in its execution.

But at the same time, Rebel Ridge is aware of a very specific problem that this specific kind of "They fucked with the wrong guy" kind of story is going to run into when it stars a Black man in America, especially when it's set in the very Deep South of America.

Because like I said, this is a film that is very obviously about Systemic Racism and the general unfairness of it all, not to mention the predominate culture of America that allows it to presist, simply because they benefit from it. It's also about how, in a world of ever-present cameras and a constant access to the rest of the world, like a vampire using sunscreen to walk around during the day, police corruption hasn't been eliminated, but instead has been forced to evolve so that it can still happen in the open. So, this is a film about the systems that have resulted from that, systems that can often be just as cruel and brutal as a truncheon or a bullet, and in some cases, cause even more damage. So... while the action scenes in Rebel Ridge are not only awesome, really awesome actually, and tense too, they're also largely bloodless, for the most part, and as far as I remember... no one gets killed.

Some people complained about this, somewhat understandably disappointed, as they wanted to see these avatars of White Supremacy get a whole heaping helping of some karmically well-deserved killing. They complained that the main character is too concerned with de-escalating these situations, instead off just putting some motherfuckers down for a long dirt nap. Like I said, this is understandable, on the surface at least, but once you examine this a bit, it starts to feel like it stems from a general lack of understanding of how the world works, like something that a white liberal can be mad about being denied, all while they're sitting in the comfort of their own living room, demanding entertainment. This complaint exposes a lack of appropirate perspective, akin to being mad when your pizza delivery doesn't arrive, even though the reason it didn't arrive is because the delivery driver got into a car accident. Because to me, at least, this movie's portrayal of Terry's actions are very obviously acutely aware of the reality of being a POC in America, especially a Black Man, as it's a place where, even in fictional versions, whether they're righteous and justified or not, a Black man killing a dozen police officers is only ever going to end up with him being hunted down by the full weight of the law until he is very dead. That's just the way the world works. Even in fiction... in America, a Black man can not be John Wick. Not against cops, at least.

Because of this, because of the 11th hour redemption of some of the cops, and probably mostly because this is story being told by a white man who maybe means well, but is ultimately telling a story that maybe doesn't belong to him, Rebel Ridge isn't my favorite film by Jeremy Saulnier.

Still the action is great. The film looks great too. It's really got some high points, and it's definitely got some cool stuff, and it certainly speaks some truths, yes, but it's also a little cowardly in some of the sadly typical ways, and it drags a little in the middle too, mostly due to that same cowardice. So, it's all right. If you haven't watched any of Saulnier's movies, I'd suggest that you watch either Blue Ruin or Green Room first.

In the end… ACAB.