Comparing Rebel Ridge to First Blood (1982) is almost too easy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s a good reason you’ll see people calling Rebel Ridge a modern take on First Blood (1982) all over the internet. They do have plenty of similarities; however, the ways in which they’re different is where both movies truly shine.
Despite what the trailers might indicate, Rebel Ridge is not an action film. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Jeremy Saulnier, whose filmography is filled with rather quiet crime thrillers that slowly ratchet up the tension before exploding in short but highly effective bursts of violence. And so Rebel Ridge too is a crime thriller that spends most of its time giving both the audience and protagonist Terry (Aaron Pierre) all the reasons to despise the local police force, in particular the police chief (Don Johnson) and one of its particularly immoral officers (Emory Cohen), as they mess around with him in increasingly infuriating abuses of power. And it already starts in a pretty bad place.
Terry comes rolling into town on his bike because he needs to pay his brother’s bail at the town hall, when the police run him over with their car and take his money under the pretense that it’s under suspicion to be drug money. And so, thanks to one unfortunate encounter with the police, he doesn’t have the money to post bail for his brother anymore, and the only way to get it both takes too long and comes with legal fees that make the whole ordeal obsolete anyway. And because that’s not enough, the police continue to play around with him in the most disgusting ways possible. For big stretches, Rebel Ridge is an infuriating watch. Not just because of what happens on screen, but because of how true it all rings to the real world.
First Blood (1982) is about the abuse of power by cops, but even more than that, it’s a movie about the poor treatment of Vietnam veterans and how America disregarded them. Rebel Ridge flips that around in that it is a movie about the treatment of soldiers; more than a few characters here have military backgrounds, but first and foremost, Rebel Ridge is a movie that is unapologetically ACAB in its messaging, in a way that we rarely if ever get to see from a big studio film. They’re usually too busy establishing that there are good cops too to ever really truly commit to an anti-police statement. There are some not completely awful cop characters in Rebel Ridge too, but it’s a different thing here. Because Rebel Ridge doesn’t care if it’s “not all cops,” if there are good ones doing it for the right reasons, or if it’s just a few bad apples ruining it for the rest. Because what it understands is that they all work within a system that enables the bad ones, sabotages the good ones, and is designed to be abused by its represenatives. Rebel Ridge takes apart the American justice system at a level beyond the individual in the uniform, as a fundamentally corrupt institution with its own gain as the number one priority, that consequently empowers and vindicates the worst kind of people.
For as calm and respectful Terry tries to be, when someone keeps spitting in your face and smiles gleefully while doing it, you got to let loose eventually. But even when it’s time to retaliate, after the cops have pushed him so far, it’s not about revenge per se. “This shit’s far from okay, and these cops might end up on top. I’m not pretending here, but they sure as shit don’t get any more outs.” Terry exclaims before heading out for a final confrontation. It’s about principles, not just for him, but the whole movie really feels like a rebuttal of the current police system. And so even in his rage-filled attack against them, he deliberately refuses to kill them. Using the police’s own non-lethal, or what they’re supposed to be referring to now, less-lethal, weaponry. It doesn’t kill anyone, but it sure hurts real bad. Another fun little detail is that instead of being like John Wick, who reloads guns like nobody else, Terry is shown repeatedly to be exceptionally good at unloading them.
So for as smart as Rebel Ridge is, I don’t want to undersell how well it works as a pulpy crime thriller. The dialogue is so deliciously sharp and creates an unparalleled badass in Aaron Pierre. He grunts and growls his way through this movie as he delivers what should become some of the most iconic one-liners of this decade in a deep voice that instills fear in whoever’s on the other side of the line. It might sound weird for this kind of movie, but this is a genuinely star-marking performance. And that only after replacing John Boyega, who left the project during the middle of the shoot.
For all the similarities and differences Rebel Ridge and First Blood (1982) have, the most important thing they share is that they’re both deceptively smart movies. Rebel Ridge is a crime thriller with momentary explosive instances of action that’s critical of our current systems in a way few studio movies of this kind are, and it’s all the better for it. That it’s also thrilling from beginning to end and works as a star vehicle for Aaron Pierre are nice side effects.
