David Ehrlich
2026-01-16 00:00:00
A shouty and self-serious action thriller about a team of ambiguously corrupt Miami cops who threaten to turn on each other after they discover a fortune of very stealable cartel money hidden in an unassuming safe house, Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” would be easy to dismiss as run-of-the-mill streaming fare if not for the casting wrinkle that juices up its drama at every juncture.
To put it simply: Ben Affleck plays one cop. Matt Damon plays another. They love each other, albeit only in a pathologically straight let’s bark hyper-steroidal sub-“Heat” jargon at each other while swallowing our feelings sort of way. But over the course of a dark and deadly night in the suburbs of Hialeah, the relationship between these ride-or-die bros will fray apart as those giant buckets full of benjamins — the titular “rip” — start to cloud the latter’s judgment. Tense as the situation is on its own, the whole thing is kicked up a notch by the sick meta spectacle of watching Hollywood’s bestest friends begin to sour into mortal enemies. It just hits different when Ben and Matt are trying to bring each other down, and “The Rip” takes full advantage of the palpable history between them from its first proper scene all the way through the last and most ridiculous of its (way too many) different endings.
The suspicions kick off with a murder-mystery that will hover over the rest of Carnahan’s script, as the captain of a Tactical Narcotics Team is gunned down by two masked shooters for reasons unknown. Her team doesn’t take it well. Quoth Detective Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor in a small, functional role that she unsurprisingly imbues with life): “She was my friend. And my bitch.”
She was also Detective Sergeant JD Byrne’s fuck buddy, so he’s extra steamed about the murder as well, and hellbent on figuring out whether his captain was killed by one of their own (Affleck is great at playing aggro with a conscience, and, as we learn in the most gratuitous one-shot male shirtless scene this side of “Ant-Man,” also shredded to the bone). It’s the only thing JD cares still about, and we believe him when he says that Damon’s increasingly disaffected Lieutenant Dane Dumars deserved the recent promotion that both men were vying for. Dane has a dead son, he needs something to live for, and JD is the kind of guy who cares about balancing the scales of justice to whatever degree he can.
“The Rip” doesn’t offer any particularly sharp insights about the moral dilemmas faced by Miami’s finest (Carnahan’s lean and hardy screenplay is less interested in big picture ideas than in getting a weary Damon to say things like “That guy just got his dick knocked in by the grind”), but the movie’s plot hinges on the notion that police don’t get paid enough, and that weeding out the “bad ones” — with bullets to the head — would make a material difference to the world at large.
So when Dane’s team discovers that the six-figure Hialeah rip is actually worth closer to $20 million, the situation turns into something of a purity test, as each member of the TNT has to suss out how far across the line their partners are willing to go (Steven Yeun and Catalina Sandino Moreno capably round out the overqualified team, the latter armed with a money-sniffing dog named Wilbur). Is it possible for an American cop in 2026 to resist the temptation to abuse their power? That’s a good question. Is it dramatically plausible? That might be an even better one.
The intergroup suspicions are plenty tense enough, but Carnahan packs this powder keg even tighter by placing Dane’s team under a ticking clock; after some other interested parties catch wind of the fortune, it’s only a matter of time before our characters find themselves under siege. Imagine a crazy aggro cross between the claustrophobic back-stabbing of a classic French heist movie and the walls are caving in implosiveness of “Assault on Precinct 13” and you’ll have a decent idea of how “The Rip” unfolds, which it does in sufficiently entertaining fashion.
Juan Miguel Azpiroz’s gritty cinematography manages to sidestep most of the Netflix gloss, Sasha Calle adds a curious wrinkle to the story as the current — and ambiguously culpable — resident of the Hialeah house, and the eventual fireworks are concussive enough to blow a hole right through your tablet or TV. It’s also worth nothing that the movie was produced by Affleck and Damon’s Artists Equity, and promises all 1,200 members of the cast and crew a one-time bonus if it manages to surpass certain viewership benchmarks; not only does that share the wealth mentality dovetail with the story at hand, but, for viewers aware of the arrangement, it also helps to chip away at the inherent disposability of straight-to-streaming content.
Is “The Rip” a better film because its third AD might actually be able to afford their rent next month? Not necessarily, but knowing that its performance matters to more than Netflix’s shareholders does restore an ounce of material weight to a project that might otherwise have felt like vaporware.
But the most important reason why “The Rip” is a slight cut above the average streaming fare is the lived-in history that Affleck and Damon bring to their characters’ dynamic. I can only speak as someone who’s associated these actors with each other for more than 30 years, but it’s raw to see JD and Dane start to second-guess each other — it engenders a state of disbelief that echoes the uncertainty felt by the rest of their team. This movie gets way too high on its own supply by the end, but for the better part of its runtime even the film’s silliest expressions of pathos (i.e. Dane’s “The Night of the Hunter”-esque hand tattoos, which I would hate to ruin for you here) are grounded by the emotional credibility of the relationship between its two leading men. “Fuck, it’d be so much easier if we just stole this money,” Dane half-jokes at one point early on. Easier to steal from a stranger’s house maybe, but there’s nothing easy about taking something that valuable away from your friends.
Grade: B-
“The Rip” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, January 16.
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