Reservoir Cops: Quentin Tarantino on The Rip

Since the pandemic, for me anyway, it seems almost impossible for a new movie to come out that I don’t pick to death. Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers or just plain stupid shit usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavourless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood.

This isn’t the first time things were bad. The 1980s were pretty bad too. Back then, when a movie self-destructed, copped out on its intriguing premise or just ran out of gas in the last 20 minutes, you didn’t even hold that against it. To expect 80s movies not to have bad endings was to expect too much. If you didn’t forgive them bad endings you just wouldn’t like anything. You might as well stop going to the movies.

Well, I did forgive them in the 80s, because I loved going to the movies. These days, however, the entire concept of what is a movie is more inclined to inspire contempt in me than generosity. Which is fair enough, because by comparison the movies of the last six years make the 80s seem like the 30s. I’ve seen movies I liked since then – West Side Story (2021); Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 and 2 (both 2024), a few others, but nothing that really held me in its grip and swept me away to the magical land of enjoyment that I used to visit regularly and was the reason I loved movies above all other artforms. These days I’d rather read a book.

But a suspenseful new movie has come out that did grab me and held me for its entire duration: Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, starring the dynamic duo of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The film is an exciting cop thriller with a novel premise that manages to deliver the goods in really clever ways. The whole package worked for me: Carnahan’s direction, the splendid cast, the look of the film (courtesy of cinematographer Juan Miguel Azpiroz) – but the real powerhouse component of this splendid collection is the sensational screenplay by Carnahan and Michael McGrale.

It’s funny: even though I’m more associated with gangster movies – and of course I do like them – I’ve always kind of preferred cop movies, especially the type I grew up watching that came out in the 70s. (I saw The French Connection twice at the cinema, the first time in 1971 when I was nine, the second a year or so later when Fox re-released it on a nationwide double feature with Vanishing Point, also 1971. That was the year I saw Dirty Harry on its initial release, too.) But it’s been such a while since I saw a truly satisfying cop flick that I practically forgot what it felt like. The Rip doesn’t just invoke that type of film fondly, it’s one of the finest examples.

Set in Florida, it follows a five-person special unit of the Miami PD called the tactical narcotics team through the end of their working day and a nail-biting night that may leave them all shot to pieces. Their former captain (Lina Esco) was assassinated execution-style by two ski mask-wearing shotgun-wielders at the film’s start, and the internal investigation that follows puts the whole team (Damon, Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor and Catalina Sandino Moreno) under suspicion.

Towards the end of the day, as they sit around shooting the shit, drinking beers, bitching about their dumb-fuck higher-ups while simultaneously wondering if the dumb fucks could be right (was it a cartel shooting or was it internal?), Damon’s Lt Dumars, who after Esco’s murder has been promoted to team leader, gets an anonymous tip on a cartel cash stash house possibly containing as much as $150,000. So even though his troops are officially off-duty (an important plot point, because their bosses at the department aren’t aware of what they’re doing), Dumars rallies them to check out the house, hopefully confiscate the money (the ‘rip’) and put a win on the board for the endangered unit.

They arrive at the homey middle-class house, at the end of a nice well-kept suburban cul-de-sac. Immediately their antennas are triggered. None of the other houses have cars in their driveways, and even though the police pull up in full force, none of the neighbours glance out of their windows or doors. (What is this, the 1974 sci-fi Where Have All The People Gone?)

Armed with a pint-sized beagle whose specialty is sniffing out cash (this pooch is the sixth member of the unit and an audience favourite), they bang cop-style on the door and find the only human who appears to live on the street, a young woman named Desi (Sasha Calle), who informs them this is her deceased grandmother’s house. They gain access to it and conduct their search, finding the hidden loot – only it’s not $150,000 but somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 million.

From the moment the $20 million is discovered, writer-director Carnahan punches a suspense clock that never stops ticking till events play out sometime near sunrise. The situation at hand was based on a real incident that Carnahan learned of from a Miami police officer. Yet he dramatically, cleverly and logically sets in place a series of circumstances that keeps making the team’s dilemma more fraught.

Once they realise the enormity of the rip, everyone understandably gets freaked out. First, because their presence is hardly a secret: a cartel hit squad could be forming this very moment. Second, with the team’s scrutiny by Internal Affairs, any questionable behaviour or discrepancies in the money confiscated will be throughly analysed. The sheer weight of the $20 million, hidden in a dozen orange storage buckets, makes it like the nitroglycerin in Sorcerer (1977), ready to blow the team to smithereens at any moment due to deadly retaliation by the bad guys who stashed it, mishandling on their part during the confiscation, or the psychological effect that $20 million has on the different team members. Over the course of the night the five-man team will find out who’s who and what’s what.

Things get off to a rocky start with Damon’s team leader’s handling of the situation. Even though they’re all under intense scrutiny, Dumars doesn’t follow procedure. He doesn’t call their discovery in, so nobody else knows how much money they found. And he’s acting kind of fucking weird. Everything he does as the officer in charge seems pretty fishy. That’s compounded by the reactions of Affleck’s detective sergeant J.D. Byrne, which are powerful for two big reasons. Byrne was the only one of the team I felt pretty sure was on the level – and it’s Ben and Matt! I thought this was going to be a buddy cop movie like Freebie and the Bean (1974), and at the beginning that’s how it seemed, only for Dumars’s dubious command decisions to turn the two against each other.

If there has ever been another movie about cops dealing the whole movie long with a dirty-money stash house, I’ve never seen it. Also, a ghost town of a suburban cartel cul-de-sac (who knows who’s inside those fucking houses!) is legit spooky. Being a cynical fuck about modern movies I kept expecting this one to drop the narrative ball and it never did. If I made a list of some of my favourite cop flicks it would include The French Connection; Freebie and the Bean; Busting (1974), which is basically Freebie and the Bean sans irony; Electra Glide in Blue (1973); To Live and Die in L.A. (1985); Bullitt (1968); Nighthawks (1981); The Black Marble (1980) and David Mamet’s Homicide (1991). I’d also include a few 70s TV movies like Foster & Laurie (1975), ‘Starsky and Hutch’ (the 1975 pilot) and Last of the Good Guys (1978). (I consider cops chasing serial killers – Dirty Harry, 1971; Cruising, 1980; Se7en, 1995 – a different sub-genre.)

While most of those movies have high-flying moments that are more spectacular than The Rip, there usually were some flaws that required my forgiveness, which since I dug those films I readily found. In Electra Glide, Robert Blake’s performance, the mythic Monument Valley locations and all his routine encounters with motorists on the road were great. But the murder mystery and the whole sub-plot featuring Jeannine Reilly and the always-dull Mitchell Ryan were a drag. After one great set-piece after another in the excellent Freebie and the Bean, the one that ends the show in the Candlestick Park men’s room is an ugly bummer. William Petersen and Willem Dafoe are terrific in To Live and Die in L.A., but John Pankow as Petersen’s partner is a miscast disaster. And when it comes to The French Connection, it’s William Friedkin’s doco-style direction that makes it so realistic, not the glaring implausibility of Ernest Tidyman’s hack screenplay. Would the French dopers really leave a car stuffed with so much smack on the street, so the cops can do exactly what they did? And even if they did do that, knowing the car is filled with all that dope, would they actually go down to the impound yard to pick it up? And does anybody really believe the cops could tear the car apart so thoroughly and put it back together in record time so the French hadn’t any idea that they ripped out the guts of it? (I questioned that at age nine.) And what about the fellow officer who Popeye kills at the film’s end, the ramifications of which are not dealt with in the sole wrap-up screen text? That one I blame on Friedkin for not cutting.

Carnahan and Michael McGrale’s script is just a much better and more cleverly written tale. This movie betters its elders by sheer virtue of never making a mistake. Also, at its centre The Rip has Damon and Affleck, who after more than 20 years in the public eye and so many movies, I think audiences have taken for granted (I know I have). But not any more. They’re truly sensational in this movie and, as good as they can be on their own, they’re fantastic when they act together. Not to mention they’ve aged into really dynamic camera subjects. I could go on and on but not without ruining some of the narrative’s clever twists, which would be foul play on my part.

With a motion picture I found so gripping, exciting, suspenseful and authentic, I was a bit surprised that none of my friends felt it was much better than an entertaining time-waster to be watched and enjoyed and promptly forgotten. When we communicated, I got a lot of, “I knew he couldn’t be dirty because this one played him, and I knew he was dirty because that one played him.” Frankly, I credited the movie and the story with more integrity than that. I had another friend say, “I knew so-and-so was the rat early on.” I told him you have a mystery with only five suspects, so maybe you did figure it out early on but I didn’t.

I hope this movie experiences a legacy close to another underrated film of its day, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). When Clint Eastwood’s film came out it was savaged by the newspaper critics (The Rip hasn’t been savaged, just underrated), and audiences definitely enjoyed it but nobody called it one of his best. Then a few years later Orson Welles, appearing on The Merv Griffin Show (1962-86), said he felt The Outlaw Josey Wales was one of the most impressive movies to come out in the last few years. Nowadays, most Eastwood fans and western aficionados consider The Outlaw Josey Wales one of Eastwood’s best and one of the best westerns of 70s (I certainly do).

I predict and hope that something similar will be The Rip’s destiny.