There’s a lot of chatter in pop culture circles around TV shows that should really be movies, movies that would be better as limited series, and everything in between.
Well, I’m here to report that The Rip, Netflix’s crime thriller flick that features the latest pairing of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, is a solid good-but-not-great movie that is actually exactly what it should be.
I’ll add too that Netflix is incredibly shrewd to fund these kinds of mid-budget movies that used to drive people to movie theaters in droves – especially with A-list stars on the marquee – but have been replaced by mega-budget tentpole IP that includes Marvel stuff, Jurassic Park-level franchises, animated and kids movies like Lilo & Stitch and A Minecraft Movie, and so on.
But let’s take a step back here because I’d like to be more specific about what I mean by a “good-but-not-great movie.” It might come across as damning with faint praise or a backhanded compliment, but it’s really not.
For many years, I bucketed a large percentage – maybe even a very large percentage – of TV shows and movies as sitting between “not good” and “awful.” As I’ve gotten a little bit older and arguably wiser, I’ve softened that position some, and try to recognize that many things are simply “not for me.”
But that being said, let’s get real: many things are simply not good by any reasonable standard. And some are frankly hot garbage.
Which leaves us with a relatively small chunk of the rest that fall into the category of The Good. Congrats, you made it! And from here, with each subsequent step up the ladder, the number of things that make the grade at that level get dramatically smaller.
That means by the time I consider something to be “very good,” it’s in relatively elite territory – I’ll throw Justified and The Deuce as examples here. Fewer things still are “great,” and above that level still is the “best.” And that’s a good excuse to invite you to visit the best 100 TV shows ever.
So by now you’ll understand that I consider The Rip to be a good movie, and in this case one that’s pulpy, fun and engaging as far as crime thrillers go, and ultimately pretty disposable in the kind of way where I doubt I’ll remember much about the plot six months from now except that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are cops in a movie where you’re not supposed to know who is dirty versus clean until the very end.*
* That being said, the inevitable twist in this one is handled at a high and satisfying level.
Then there’s the part where The Rip is a good movie that knows it’s a movie. The “container” for the story was the exact right one at just under two hours of runtime.
The entire story takes place during one day. This is not uncommon in movies of course, but often when this is the case character development can be a bit scanty, harming the overall quality of the film. An aggressive example of this is movies like Nick of Time, the not very good (there, I said it) 1995 thriller starring Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken that leans way too heavily on the fact that the story takes place in “real time.”
Nick of Time, get it? Yep, there’s a reason that it’s not, shall we say, a classic.
But The Rip does a credible job in setting up the story, the characters, and the stakes rather quickly. I’m tempted to add that it’s able to simply let things rip from there, but I’d like to think that I’m better than that.*
* Note to self: you might not be better than that.
An inciting incident involving the murder of a police captain (played by Lina Esco, who I really enjoyed in the criminally underrated MMA-focused show, Kingdom) sets things into action and tightens the focus throughout The Rip. Affleck plays a police sarge who had been involved with the captain, and he’s buddies with the recently promoted Lieutenant on his squad, played by Damon.
Sidenote here that it’s simply fun to see Affleck and Damon together in a movie where they’re buddies with a lengthy history together. The Last Duel, from 2021, is a rather dreary affair overall, and while Affleck lightens things up slightly in that one, our guys are definitely not kicking back over some grog in that one.
It helps a lot too that the rest of The Rip’s cast is also stellar. Steven Yeun (great in both Beef and The Walking Dead) and Kyle Chandler (clear eyes, full hearts… you know the rest) play a major role in what becomes the central story: a bust (or rip) of a stash house that ends up having vastly more cash than it’s “supposed to.”
And that’s where the plot and the fun jump off: who’s clean, who’s dirty, who was involved in the captain’s murder, and where do the real allegiances lie.
All of which gets figured out under two hours, letting us get on with the rest of our lives and otherworldly pop cultural ambitions.