The Rip

After finding a secret stash of millions of dollars in the walls of a Florida home, a group of Miami police officers find themselves beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.

When Captain Jackie Velez of the Miami-Dade Police Department is murdered by a pair of shotgun-wielding masked men—both of whom couldn’t look less like a pair of cops in disguise—suspicion immediately falls on her own specialized unit, the Tactical Narcotics Team, a team of cowboy cop assholes otherwise known simply as TNT.

They call themselves TNT, because cops get off on dumb shit like that. It makes them feel like bad ass warriors, even though they’re mostly an unimpressive gaggle of cruel fuckers with inferiority complexes, made up of the dumbest kids you went to high school with, and the most ate-up wannabe Rambos you served with.

In the wake of this murder, Captain Velez’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Dane Dumars gets an "anonymous" tip about a stash house in the city of Hialeah. Dane and his fellow detectives, JD Byrne, Mike Ro, Numa Baptiste, and Lolo Salazar, all head to the address to search the house for illicit money. Now, I’m sure you’re now probably like, how am I expected to keep all these weird-ass, Dad-fiction-sounding names straight? Pro-tip? It’s easier to think of them just by their real names: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, recently from One Battle After Another, and the mom from the tv show From, a show that you really should check out, if you haven’t yet.

After illegally bullying their way into the home, indirectly owned by a young woman named Desi—played by Supergirl from the Flash movie—the way that cops always do (lies, threats, and intimidation), they discover $20 million in drug cartel cash hidden in the attic. Realizing the high risk that comes with seizing such a large sum of money, Matt decides not to follow standard protocol and refuses to notify higher command. He also confiscates the entire team's phones in order to keep the discovery quiet while they count the cash on site. But after a pair of cops, so crooked they can barely sit up straight in their cruiser, show up and sniff around in a threatening manner, the detectives arm themselves, and while, to be fair, there isn't a moment where Matt surveys the surrounding neighborhood and grimly says "It's quiet..." only for Ben Affleck to nod along in grim agreement and add, "Yeah... too quiet," it's heavily implied. To add to the tension, Supergirl tells the cops that she was instructed by the Cartel that, in the event the stash is discovered, she is to just offer them a share of the money, and that it would be better for all of them if they just took some and walked away.

But not these cops, they're all "one of the good ones" supposedly...

As if on cue, the landline rings, and everyone panics, because who answers phone calls these days, especially from a land line? What is this? 1982? Luckily, Matt still holds to the old ways and he answers. A mysterious voices on the other end of the connection threatens the team, telling them to leave... or else. The cops are starting to get nervous, which is bad for everyone, because nervous cops have a tendency to either shoot innocent citizens, or to beat their wives. TNT begins to argue amongst themselves, and the tension ratchets up, or so we're told by the various characters. It soon becomes clear that the cops are starting to think there's a rat amongst them, and that they suspect each other of planning to steal the money.

Ben then confronts Matt for lying about the original tip, which Matt refuses to show Ben, mostly because Ben and Jackie Velez, the murdered police captain, had a bit of thing going on before she was killed, and it's obvious that this is who the tip actually came from. I assume that Matt refuses to show Ben the tip, because he is afraid that, if he shows Ben the tip, which is just a text on his phone that basically says "Drug house in Hialeah. Go there." Ben will get all upset, and probably punch a wall while hot angry tears get his beard all damp, because the text is clearly from Jackie, and if he realizes this, then he'll start thinking about how she is dead, and he'll never hold her again, or smell her hair, or hear her laugh, and he might want to talk about that with Matt, and he'll probably even cry, and this would make Matt uncomfortable, because open displays of emotion threaten his masculinity, and he only knows how to react to this by being angry, and when he gets angry, because he's a cop, he starts shooting innocent citizens, which, to be fair, the freedom to do that is why he became a cop in the first place, but then they'd just have to bury yet another body, and they already have all this cash to deal with, and it would be one more hassle for the pile on an already stressful night. Plus, it's raining out, and yadda, yadda, yadda...

At least, I assume. It's left unsaid, but again... I think it's heavily implied.

Anyway, because of this, Ben is starting to think Matt might be crooked too. So Ben calls his buddy, DEA Agent Coach from Friday Night Lights, who also suggests that Matt may have been involved with Captain Velez's murder in the beginning of the film. But there will have to be time for that later, as just as the cops realize the entire neighborhood is empty and under the cartel's control, the power is suddenly cut and the bullets begin to fly.

But then–a twist!–it turns out that the cartel isn’t behind any of this.

Over a Facetime call, a Cartel Guy says in a very burlesqued accent that not only is the Cartel not involved with the killing of Jackie the police captain, he also tells the cops that the cartel is washing their hands of the millions of dollars stashed in that house and walking away. This is a testament not only to the truly ungodly amount of money the cartels have available to them, and as a result, the amount that they are able to write off as a loss, but also to the complete ineffectuality of the CBP, the DEA, and law enforcement in general when it comes to the War on the Drugs, which naturally leads one to speculate whether this ineffectuality is due to the fact that the dumbest thick-neck assholes possible are responsible for the whole effort, or if it’s on purpose for the financial benefit of America’s ruling political class and their corporate billionaire pedophile buddies.

But I digress…

If the cartel aren’t the bad guys, then who is?

Well, the fact that literally almost every other single character in this film is a cop may provide a clue. After that, the plot is re-explained in great detail, the bad guys are revealed, and a surprise twist is sprung on the sadly unsuspecting turncoats. There’s a little bit of hard driving after that, and more than a little lead exchanged between former friends, before the heroes finally wrestle their specific nemeses in the mud, saying one last final grim declaration through gritted teeth and giving out a hard goodbye or two. Finally, in the rainy aftermath, the surrounding night painted in the flashing red and blue of American justice, a single chin nod of respect is raised between manly compatriots.

Ugly. Stupid. Boring. Obvious. This is a bad film. It’s not even good as fireworks playing in the background. It feels like it was made in a single weekend, and was written mostly by AI after feeding it every episode of COPS ever made. Imagine a fanfic tribute to actual good films, like Heat or Thief, one that was made by an obvious huge fan, but it turns out to be fucking stupid. That's The Rip.

In a nutshell, it’s the worst kind of copaganda.

I mean, pretty much all action films are inherently copaganda, at least… to an extent, right? Even all the way over on the spectrum to superhero films, there’s an unavoidable authoritarian might-makes-right bend to the whole base concept of these kinds of things. It’s just something that you have to accept, if you’re going to enjoy the genre. But that said, there’s "good" copaganda, and then there’s "bad" copaganda.

The Rip is the worst kind of copaganda.

This makes sense once you realize that the film is inspired by the true story of Miami-Dade County Sheriff Chris Casiano, who, in 2016, uncovered $20 million hidden inside a Miami Lakes residence when his narcotics squad raided the home. Thus, the main problem... the copaganda is coming straight from the cop's mouth. Once you know this, then "inspired by" is clearly doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and was only used because it sounds better than "very, very, very loosely based on true events, with a large amount of dramatic license take in order for me to look clever and awesome and also as a hero."

But this isn’t why the film is terrible.

Well, it’s not the entire reason…

A big part of the problem is that apparently Netflix also has a certain house style when it comes to making movies, something I don’t know if I’ve noticed before, but maybe I have and didn't make the connection, but either way, now it makes sense why most of Netflix’s original films are so god damn terrible (Not just the Zach Snyder ones either). And the weirdest part is that Matt Damon seemed to spend the entire press tour for this crappy little film going on and on about it too, as if it’s a good thing. I don’t understand what he thinks he’s talking about here, or why he thinks it’s good, but he even went on the Joe Rogan Experience and talked about it, which is awful all on it’s own, because Joe Rogan is idiot ear cancer for stupid assholes, but anyway, Matt Damon explains it thusly…

"A standard way to make an action movie, that (Ben Affleck and I) learned, is you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second and one in the third and they kinda ramp up. And the big one with all the explosions, you spend most of your money on that one in the third act and that's your kinda finale. Now, they’re (Netflix) like, ‘Can we get a big action set piece in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn't be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times during the film because people are on their phone while they're watching.”

And again, he says this like it's a good thing...

So basically, under the Netflix original movie model, characters will announce exactly what they’re doing, while they’re doing it, so that the dipshits out there who are half-watching the film while scrolling their phones and watching TikTok at full volume, are able to follow along, or at least, can’t complain that they weren’t given plenty of chances to keep up. And that's exactly what they do here. During the film, Matt Damon looks at his phone a half dozen-plus times, and not just peeking at the “anonymous” tip sent by Jackie, like a poker player constantly rechecking that his cards are the same, but also at the screen savior of his dead son, because as it turns out, this was mandated. How else are audiences supposed to remember the story's inciting incident, or the fact that Matt’s character isn’t just regular sad, but dead kid sad? God forbid you miss a plot point while you’re busy candy-crushing. Matt may as well hold the phone up to the camera every twenty minutes or so and say “‘Member this?” The film has Matt explain the meaning behind his character’s terrible hand tattoos two times—and they are such dumb tattoos too, so dumb that they have to be something the real life cop has. Two times! To the same god damn character even! He explains the meaning behind them two god damn times, maybe 45 minutes apart, and both times it’s to Supergirl. The whole film truly is like this. They even recap the entire very obvious and very easy to follow plot for the benefit of their barely-engaged audience, stopping all the action in a dead halt, just four characters sitting there and talking, slowly explaining shit that we all saw happen, just laying it out plain on the table at the beginning of the third act, and all while "exciting" music plays, as if this recap is tense.

It’s so bad!

And it’s not like I’m expecting high art from my action films, but this? This is anti-art. This is the cinematic equivalent of making airplane noise while trying to cram diarrhea-colored vegetable-slop into a fussy baby’s mouth.

It's SO bad.

So… yeah, this is a garbage film.

At this point, I want to say that director Joe Carnahan has fucking lost it, but after watching this film, it’s so hard for me to remember him ever actually being good at all, that I can't honestly say whether or not he ever actually had it to begin with.

Pass.