Loosely based on a true story, The Rip tells the tale of a group of Miami cops who receive a tip about a stash house with millions of dollars of cash hidden in the walls—and their efforts to count and remove the cash from the home without getting killed—while also resisting the temptation to steal any of it.
From writer-director Joe Carnahan (The Gray, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team), the film opens with the murder of a task-force leader who manages to send a text message before getting gunned down in cold blood. Best friends Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon) and Det. Sgt. JD Byrne (Ben Affleck) are eager to find the cop killer and frustrated that their bosses don’t seem as motivated. Byrne was having a relationship with the late officer, making his anger all the more palpable.
The shift is just ending when Dumars gets a tip about the stash house and assembles his team (which also includes Steven Yeun as Det. Ro, Teyana Taylor as Det. Baptiste, and Catalina Sandino Moreno as Det. Salazar), and they get to the house, expecting to find a couple hundred thousand dollars. The only person on the premises is Desi (Sasha Calle, the only good thing in The Flash, in which she played Supergirl), the granddaughter of the woman who lived there until she recently died. The place is in a bit of a mess, but it doesn’t look like it belongs to drug dealers or have anything criminal going on inside. Still, it doesn’t take long for the team to find buckets of wrapped cash behind the walls in the attic, totaling around $20 million—far more than they were expecting and an amount that a drug cartel would miss and do anything to protect—meaning their lives are immediately in danger.
Throughout the seizure, we start to spot clues that things aren’t right within the team. Dumars begins to act squirrely about the amount reported to be in the house versus the actual amount, and he's clearly thinking of taking some of the cash. As close as he and Byrne are, even Byrne starts to question his behavior. Also, it appears Ro is a snitch, calling in updates to someone (presumably someone in Internal Affairs), when he shouldn’t even have a phone. Even Desi starts to act like she knows more than she’s telling when she knowingly informs the police that they should take whatever money they want and get out. And then a phone call comes in warning the team that killing will begin in 30 minutes and that they should get out immediately.
It’s around this time that they also notice that none of the houses on the block seem to have residents or cars in the driveways or people walking in and out of them, and someone brings up rumors that cartels are buying up entire blocks of homes to keep from attracting the attention of nosy neighbors. At various points in the story, every character has a secret or two, and in most instances, the audience ends up knowing more than any one person in the cast. Loyalties are tested, allegiances are formed, and old friends come to blows over procedure and what constitutes a crime when police are notoriously underpaid. Damon and Affleck use decades of real-life friendship as the foundation for this relationship, and as much fun as it is watching them pal around early in The Rip, it’s even more enjoyable watching them come close to tearing each other apart when things go south.
Carnahan’s crackling screenplay also does a great deal of the heavy lifting, offering a truly lived-in quality to the film, with word choices and phrasings that feel unique to area law enforcement and people who know each other far too well. There’s a sequence in which a local cartel member presents themself to the team member to ensure them that they are not involved in any of these goings on, and I can honestly say, I’ve never seen a scene like it in any police movie. The climax of the film includes a fairly standard-issue car chase and several big reveals, and while neither feels quite as authentic as the rest of the movie, it’s all still pretty thrilling in the moment.
With fun supporting performance by Kyle Chandler (as a local DEA agent who is friendly with the task force), Scott Adkins (as an FBI agent who is not), and Nestor Carbonell (as the police chief), The Rip is a consistently tense, heated, ramped-up thriller of the highest order and a great excuse to see Damon and Affleck sharing the screen once again and showing us why chemistry matters in telling any story. Admittedly, it bums me out this film never got a theatrical run, but it’s still a solid, sometimes brutal ride.
The film begins streaming today on Netflix.
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