[COLUMN] Rebel Ridge is Rambo Meets Michael Clayton | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Rebel Ridge.

The obvious point of comparison for Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge is First Blood, the first (and best) Rambo movie. Rebel Ridge focuses on a former marine named Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), who arrives in the small Louisiana town of Shelby Springs to post bail for his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc). However, Terry quickly finds himself in conflict with the local police department, headed by Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson). Inevitably, the conflict between the veteran and the police force escalates.

There is a lot of John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in Terry Richmond. Both are effectively one-man armies. Late in the movie, Officer Jessica Sims (Zsané Jhé) draws a gun on Terry and warns him, ”I've seen what you can do. So believe me. I'll put two rounds in your head if you move an inch.” Like Rambo, Terry makes his home in the woods around Shelby Springs. Like Rambo, this one man proves a more-than-worthy opponent to a very well-supplied police force.

It's probably no surprise that writer and director Jeremy Saulnier would be drawn to this sort of story. Saulnier is the rare modern filmmaker who produces the sorts of old-fashioned thrillers that have largely been displaced by modern franchises. Many of Saulnier’s films — including Rebel Ridge — feel like the kinds of movies that would have found a larger audience and grown into cult classics if they had made their way into cable rotation during the 1990s.

Saulnier’s movies are often about the brutality and violence lurking beneath the surface. In Blue Ruin, Dwight (Macon Blair) sets out for revenge, without understanding the chaos that will follow. Green Room sets a punk band in conflict with neo-Nazis, after a concert goes horribly awry. In Hold the Dark, Medora Slone (Riley Keough) hires Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) to hunt the wolf she claims murdered her son (Beckham Crawford), only for Core to discover something much darker is at play.

In Saulnier’s work, there is always a sense that the characters – and perhaps humanity itself – is teetering on the edge of the abyss. As Andrew Barker observed in his review of Hold the Dark, it doesn’t matter “whether that abyss is the pitilessness of nature, the madness of war, or the casual cruelty of a colonial civilization.” There is a darkness at the heart of most of Saulnier’s films, and that darkness exerts an incredible and almost inescapable pull.

It is very easy to imagine a version of Rebel Ridge which pushes in that direction, which treats Terry as an inherently violent man just looking to feed something inside himself, using the corrupt local law enforcement as a justification for his violence. After all, Rebel Ridge belongs to the long line of “war veterans as vigilantes” films that includes Rambo, The Exterminator and Billy Jack. Such portrayals have been criticized for ostracizing and othering veterans, but the trope persists.

However, Rambo is not the only major influence on Rebel Ridge. Saulnier has described Rebel Ridge as “First Blood meets Michael Clayton.” Interestingly, it is not the only film this autumn that feels heavily indebted to Tony Gilroy’s legal thriller. A heady procedural drama about institutional corruption and the moral decay of late capitalism might seem like a strange bedfellow for one of the quintessential Vietnam movies, but Saulnier isn’t exaggerating.

Rebel Ridge is very interested in the mechanics of bureaucracy and the application of power. Saulnier pays attention to the details. At one point, Terry’s former employer, Mister Liu (Dana Lee), explains that there’s a $1,000 limit on money orders, which makes it more difficult to wire Terry some much-needed cash. The film spends a lot of time explaining the logic of “civil asset forfeiture”, a real-life practice that allows law enforcement to effectively claim private property from individuals based on nothing more than the suspicion it is connected to a crime. Law enforcement officials even attend seminars to tell them which property is worth seizing – flat screen televisions, cash and cars.

In the opening scene of Rebel Ridge, Officers Evan Marston (David Denman) and Steve Lann (Emory Cohen) use the law to seize the money that Terry had been planning to use to bail Mike out of jail.  When local court worker Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb) explains the concept to Terry, he’s confused. “And it’s legal?” he asks. She simply replies, “It’s a law.” Terry spends much of the first half of Rebel Ridge trying to navigate these absurd systems, to get his cousin out of custody.

There is a brutality at play in Rebel Ridge, but it is a very organized and very structured sort of brutality. Summer realizes quite early on that something is suspicious about the Shelby Springs Police Department. Sandy Burnne was hit with a “wrongful death” lawsuit recently, but his department claims to have cleaned up its act - at least, as Summer notes, “on paper.” Now local police cruisers are all fitted with dashcams, programmed to start recording as soon as the sirens come on.

Summer discovers that Burnne’s department has been arresting suspects on minor charges, setting absurdly high bail and holding these suspects for precisely ninety days – never more and never less. Summer and Terry eventually realize that this is because that dashcam footage is legally required to be kept for ninety days, so Burnne effectively holds victims of police brutality hostage long enough for the evidence of such misconduct to be expunged from the system. This isn’t random violence. It’s structural.

The civil institutions of Shelby Springs have collapsed. At one point, Summer even warns Terry that she “wouldn’t drink the public water.” Burnne isn’t a police chief, he’s a gangster operating a shakedown scam. He even bought his officers a $9,000 margarita machine “for the morale.” However, Burnne isn’t the representative of some shady cabal. The people of Shelby Springs aren’t constituents, but co-conspirators. The entire community buys into this institutional violence.

Terry asks a local judge (James Cromwell) if Burnne “cut [him] in on it.” The judge smiles. “Me and every other taxpayer,” he replies. “That money flows back into debt service, payroll, public works. That's Christmas lights in December, fireworks on the Fourth of July, and a nice little old tax cut on top. Everyone holds their seat.” Indeed, if Burnne can’t keep generating cash through this shakedown racket, it’ll lead to “disincorporation. Shelby Springs disappears.” It’s a very pure form of capitalism, in which the police are little more than a money making racket; to serve and collect.

In some ways, Terry is an atypical protagonist for a Jeremy Saulnier movie. Saulnier himself concedes that Terry is “a traditional badass action-movie hero, compared to [his] previous filmography.” However, what is really interesting about Terry is that he’s an action hero who spends a significant portion of the film trying to de-escalate the situation and to avoid direct confrontation. As Saulnier has joked, he wrote the script while constantly asking himself, “Can I get through a screenplay without killing everybody in it?”

As such, Terry spends a lot of the movie compromising with the police department. When he confronts Burnne about the money, he’s happy to take the $10,000 he needs for Mike’s bail and leave the $26,000 with the department. He is polite, initially deferring to Burnne (and Liu) as “sir.” He rarely uses firearms, often unloading and disassembling weapons before discarding them. He really wants to avoid unnecessary escalation.

There is a racially charged subtext to this. Terry is a Black man, and so that early police stop is infused with an uncomfortable dread. Terry’s politeness and deference to the corruption and the violence of the Shelby Springs police department feels informed by “the talk”, a conversation that many African American parents have with their children about the need to keep almost impossibly calm during even routine interactions with law enforcement, because the stakes are so high.

This threat underpins so much of Rebel Ridge. Around the midpoint, Burnne informs Terry that Mike was brutally attacked by other inmates while in custody. Burnne offers to pay Terry off, explaining, “Right now, you gotta choose between a bag full of money and our deepest sympathies or 30 years minimum.” Then Burnne articulates the real threat, the shotgun in Marston’s hand: “Or worse, if you can't stay in control.” Mike dies en route to the hospital, and Terry takes the bribe to leave town.

Rebel Ridge is built on a familiar template, the story of a drifter who comes to town and faces down a corrupt institution. However, it stands apart because of the amount of time and effort that Terry devotes to minimizing potential conflict. However, there is no amount of compromise that Burnne will accept. Burnne explains his rejection of Terry’s invitation to keep the $26,000, “It wasn't the offer you made. It was the fact that you thought you were entitled to make one.”

“When they sent me on my way, I was grateful,” Terry later confesses to Summer. He reflects on his own background, as a martial arts instructor for the Marine Corps. “How I train, what I teach, most of it comes down to self-preservation. So I guess I just acted accordingly.” The great evil in Rebel Ridge is the way that these systems and structures are designed to facilitate victims’ surrender to the inevitability of their own oppression. To feel a boot upon their neck and say “thank you.”

Even when forced into direct confrontation after the department targets Summer and tries to murder him, Terry retains the moral high ground. Rebel Ridge builds to a climax with no fatalities. When Terry shoots Burnne with a shotgun in the evidence room, he explains, “It’s a beanbag round; less lethal.” There is a strange moral order to the world of Rebel Ridge. At one point, Lann picks up a shotgun and takes a shot at Terry, only to realize it’s the same shotgun Terry emptied earlier.

Driving with Terry to the hospital following the attack on Mike, Burnne ruminates upon modern policing. “That's the new thing,” he concedes. “De-escalation. Save the perps from themselves. Everybody lives to fight another day.” It is no small irony that Burnne and his officers deploy lethal force while trying to stop Terry, but it’s Terry who manages to uphold their own oath. Even as he literally tears down the police headquarters, he overwhelms the department with non-lethal force.

As she discovers the true depths of corruption in Shelby Springs, Summer realizes that the lawsuit against Burnne “didn't turn things around, [but] turned them upside down.” In some ways, Rebel Ridge feels like an interesting inversion of the classic Jeremy Saulnier films. In most Saulnier movies, savagery lurks just beneath the thin veneer of civilized society. His protagonists often wobble on the precipice, drawn to that darkness whether as vessels or as spectators.

In Rebel Ridge, the structures and systems are themselves a form of violence. Confronted with such brutality, it’s up to the hero to impose civility.