AP – Rebel Ridge opens with a shot of a lanky, muscular stranger riding into a small, corrupt Southern town – a scene we’ve all seen plenty of times. Except this stranger isn’t in a truck or on a horse. He’s on a bicycle.
It’s one of many ways that writer-director Jeremy Saulnier both honours and has fun with movie conventions on his way to making clearly one of the best things on Netflix.
The tight, taut and tension-filled is the story of a former Marine who arrives in Shelby Springs, Louisiana, to post his cousin’s bond and gets sucked into taking on its shady law enforcement department.
The last time a relative came to help his cousin from the clutches of less-than-ideal small town Southern legal system it was a comedy with Joe Pesci and a hero named Vinny. If you ever needed a hint that this isn’t that movie, the opening sequence is scored to Iron Maiden.
The movie stars Aaron Pierre as our former Marine, Terry Richmond, a man with mad martial arts and survival skills (he catches fish with his bare hands), and, on the opposite side, Don Johnson as the courtly but deadly chief of police, as venal as Richmond is noble.
Saulnier – who dealt with frontier justice and lawlessness in his previous Blue Ruin and Green Room – has given this action-thriller loads of social context: racism, addiction, the cash bail system, small-town funding and militarised cops.
Like its leading man, Rebel Ridge is a lean, muscular movie with few over-the-top special effects, save for Pierre’s spectacular eyes. It’s a triumph of small-budget, naturalistic filmmaking, where cars on a gravel road kick up choking clouds of dust and arm bones crack when pressure is applied.
The script is spare – allowing for some homespun poetry. So if a bottle of coconut water is brought up in one scene, it’s going be used in another. There are interesting camera angles, like the backseat of a speeding car or a tense cell phone call inside an old-fashioned phone booth. – Mark Kennedy
