Monday, September 9, 2024

REBEL RIDGE



This was better than I expected it to be! When I saw the trailer a few weeks ago I was completely turned off. It looked like raceplay fanfiction. That is absolutely not my thing. I’ll never be a fan of directors using Black people to push some cringey nonsense. I’m also just not a big fan of Jeremy Sauliner’s films. Green Room was fine for what it was but I haven’t revisited it. Blue Ruin was “ok” but I never understood the hype/push behind it. I thought Hold The Dark was very bad. The ingredients were there for a potentially good movie but when everything was put together it was just a big nothing-burger. So it took a lot for me to watch Rebel Ridge. Yes - I absolutely prejudged this movie. That’s on me. But can you really blame me? It seems like now more than ever when a Black lead is cast in a film it’s done for some type of disingenuous political statement. Casting Black people in films simply to annoy people that already don’t like them is so empty & childish to me. I know this sounds like a broken record on this blog but I don’t like movies that look like they were made for cringey political twitter discourse: A lone stoic Black marine taking down a corrupt small town police system. At the end of the day that is essentially what Rebel Ridge is about, but Jeremy Saulnier managed to make it enjoyable & entertaining. Had this been in another young/young-ish director’s hands this would’ve been more of an insufferable political statement and less of a movie. This felt like a Craig Zahler movie made for people that don’t have the same political & social views as him (I do find his movies interesting but at the same if they didn’t exist it wouldn’t make any difference in my life). Rebel Ridge is so S. Craig Zahler-esque (on a surface level) that Jeremy Saulnier even casted one of Zahler’s regular actors (Don Johnson) in a very Zahler/modern-day Don Johnson-type role (evil redneck sheriff with an angry southern drawl).

Obviously, any & all comparisons to First Blood are fair (Rebel Ridge also comes from the same school as the Reacher series where the lone badass details every way he’s going to hurt every one around him before actually doing it, but it’s more First Blood than any thing else).

First Blood was in my lookbook – Jeremy Saulnier, GQ Magazine
First Blood / Rebel Ridge


The Billy Jack series is another major visual inspiration...

My production designer said, "Oh, this is like Billy Jack," and then I watched it. I was like, "Oh, fuck yeah." - Jeremy Saulnier, GQ Magazine
Billy Jack / Rebel Ridge

The Born Losers / Rebel Ridge


But the First Blood comparisons are deeper than surface visual similarities. *SPOILER ALERT* Like First Blood, Rebel Ridge has plenty of blood shed (I guess) but very little actual deaths. If I’m not mistaken, the only deaths in Rebel Ridge are either offscreen or non violent. This is where the Zahler comparisons stop. Had this been an S. Craig Zahler movie – the murders would have more than likely been very graphic (racial tension does obviously loom over the film but there isn’t any racist name-calling or anything like that). I imagine Saulnier & Netflix didn’t want to present a film where a large Black man is murdering white police officers. But there’s still a decent amount of violence in the movie with an emphasis on close hand-to-hand combat (strangely enough, this is one of his most non-violent films when compared to Green Room or Hold The Dark). There’s always a close-up or an emphasis on our lead character whenever he disarms someone and makes a point to empty the bullets out of whatever gun he gets a hold of...




The trailer (and the opening scene) might mislead some folks that are expecting nonstop action from start to finish. There isn’t. This movie plays off of tension more than anything else. The big action doesn’t even really take place until the very end. This might not be for everyone and I do think Saulnier played it safe in the end by redeeming one of the corrupt police officers and sort of kind of redeeming another one (making the lead character former military also makes it easier to digest the violence towards police instead of him just being some guy off the street). But at the end of the day I had very low expectations about this one and ended up being pleasantly surprised.

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