Movie review: Pierre delivers star-making turn in action thriller ‘Rebel Ridge’

In Jeremy Saulnier’s fifth feature, “Rebel Ridge,” a Rambo-inspired riff on racial profiling and the insidious banality of evil baked into American policing, the filmmaker demonstrates his incredible mastery of the taut action thriller. His skill with this specific subgenre has been on display since “Blue Ruin” (2013), and throughout his oeuvre, from “Green Room” (2016) to “Hold the Dark” (2018), but in “Rebel Ridge,” Saulnier’s examination of space and pace transcends anything that has come before, as he coolly alternates extreme control with bursts of explosive fury over the course of 2 hours and 10 minutes.

It’s in this unique cadence that Saulier’s MO snaps into focus: his formal cinematic expression as a reflection of his protagonist’s state of mind. In “Rebel Ridge,” which Saulnier wrote, directed and edited, the story, and subsequent film style, zeroes in on Terry (Aaron Pierre), a man caught in a crushingly quotidian nightmare that spins out of control when he is pushed to his limit. Terry maintains his cool, until he doesn’t, and it’s a thrill to watch how Saulnier lets this character off his leash.

In this star-making performance, Pierre is terrific as a man with a particular skill set thrumming below his composed, placid surface. With his golden eyes, velvet voice and smooth gait, Pierre is like a puma prowling across the screen, but Terry’s temperament is much more like a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike — only when threatened.

For the plot engine of “Rebel Ridge,” Saulnier takes on a common but often nasty practice in law enforcement: civil asset forfeiture. In the opening sequence, Terry is cycling through the small Southern town of Shelby Springs when a police officer (David Denman) sloppily attempts to pull him over, hits Terry with his squad car, detains him and seizes the stack of cash he has in his backpack “under suspicion” that it’s drug currency.

Terry had been carrying the cash in order to bail out his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc) from jail, hoping to spring him before a transfer to the state penitentiary, where he’d be in dire danger as a former witness in a murder trial. But Terry’s money disappears into a property locker, where it will remain until he can contest the seizure in court, months later. A spunky young legal aide, Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), also informs him that the police department makes a habit of this in order to fund their budget (and some margarita machines), after a civil suit resulted in a perfunctory “cleanup” job of their corrupt practices.

By simply existing, and refusing to accept that the police department has stolen his money (and in doing so, endangered his family) Terry has kicked a carefully calibrated hornet’s nest, riling up a swarm of good ol’ boy cops (including an always excellent Emory Cohen), who answer to Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson). But what these cops don’t realize is that Terry is also someone they don’t want to mess with, as they discover too little, too late that he’s not just an ex-Marine, he’s a Marine Corps Martial Arts Program instructor.

There’s a lot of talk of police procedure in the lead-up to the action of “Rebel Ridge,” though Saulnier seeds bursts of violence throughout, as Terry seizes control of the situation, and Saulnier aligns us with his subjective experience. Long, gliding tracking shots with sophisticated camera and character blocking give way to hectic handheld movements as he scraps and tussles with his foes. Saulnier utilizes the edit to evoke Terry’s increasing hyper-vigilance, constantly keeping tabs on everyone in his vicinity as he realizes just how deep the corruption in Shelby Springs goes.

However, it is this detailed discussion of mundane legal details — and how the police manipulate policy to their own benefit — that is the point of Saulnier’s film, not just the breathtaking action. Terry has found himself descending into a hellish odyssey of bureaucracy, paperwork and a “justice” system that relies far too heavily on the discretion of small-town cops and judges who have their own motivations and biases, and who all too easily make decisions that value budgets over human lives: Black lives, female lives, addict lives.

Within this complex system of constantly shifting allegiances, one highly skilled man can root out the weaknesses and disrupt the food chain, but hanging over the narrative of “Rebel Ridge” is a sense of frustrated futility, that this can and will happen again and again. Another lawsuit, another life lost, another workaround. But for a moment, one man on a bike with a few expertly wielded weapons can wreak holy havoc on these corrupt cops, and damn does it feel good to watch.