Blue Steal: REBEL RIDGE

Those of us with a taste for patiently proportioned action filmmaking, of the sort that’s all the more satisfying for a long fuse, will find much to enjoy with Rebel Ridge. Here’s a blood-boiler of a thriller, percolating with righteous anger as it stokes a steady sense of tension and suspense. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is good at this sort of thing—a slow and steady escalation of inevitable conflict. His fine-tuned Blue Ruin, with a fumbling amateur quest for vengeance, or Green Room, with a rock band besieged by neo-Nazis, show a gripping sense of tightly contained menace and looming doom. He brings those skills to Rebel Ridge, in which a perfectly unjust situation gets only more complicated the more those in power feel emboldened to do their dirty work in broad daylight, try to stamp it out instead of doing the right thing. It leaves a man without power no choice but to grab on for dear life and hope for real justice to prevail. The inciting incident finds a good man (Aaron Pierre), a black veteran, stopped by small-town police (David Denman and Emory Cohen) on his way to bail his cousin out of jail. Seeing a fat stack of cash in his backpack, his life savings, the cops take it and scoff at his protestations of innocence. Evidence, they say. Suspected criminal proceeds. Civil forfeiture. He can fill out a form to dispute the confiscation and hope for the best. Highway robbery. The more he tries to get his money back, the more the cops harass him, intimidate him, insinuate he’d be arrested or worse if he even thinks about pursuing this further.

The movie is smart about the ways in which a police force can get high on their immunity and act with impunity, even as their posturing bravado and barking orders barely cover their hair-trigger tempers and easily bruised egos. (Chief Don Johnson is perfectly enraging as a man used to getting his way through mere intimation of power.) And it’s smart, too, about the logic of a crooked cop’s traffic stop escalation, and the ways in which an officer can feel totally safe to pull a gun out and shoot an unarmed man without fear of retribution. This simmering in the background of the film’s slow-growing crescendo gives an edge of danger—even as potentially sympathetic “good cops”—let alone a local courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), who has her own dangers—are slow to do the right thing out of reasonable fear of their own colleagues. What gives the movie a satisfying kick beyond the social justice angle is its commitment to grubby genre simplicity—a good match of intentions. These cops messed with the wrong guy. Like a low-key, slightly more realistic Walking Tall or First Blood or Jack Reacher, this veteran is more than ready to stand up for himself. The movie’s look and mood is as clean and clear and simple as its setup, holding close on Pierre’s intense eyes and powerful stance, negotiating the frame to maximize the physicality of the blocking. It holds steady in stillness until—wham!—firearms are aimed and fists are clenched. It exercises such admirable restraint—even in its well-earned action finale never turning into a mindless blood-lust—that each punch or gunshot lands with considerable force.