Joe Carnahan’s The Rip arrives with the familiar Netflix sheen, but beneath that polish is something tougher, meaner, and far more cinematic than the algorithm usually allows. A pressure-cooker crime thriller steeped in mistrust and moral rot, the film leans hard into character before letting violence and paranoia take the wheel. It’s a throwback with modern muscle – a Miami-set night from hell where loyalty is currency and everyone’s running a deficit.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, reuniting once again as cops who’ve seen too much and trust too little, bring a lived-in grit that grounds the film from the jump. There’s an unspoken shorthand between them – decades of shared screen history doing half the work – and Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces, Shadow Force) smartly weaponises that familiarity. As $24 million in seized cash sits like a live grenade in a derelict stash house, the film thrives on the slow corrosion of certainty. Who’s clean? Who’s desperate? Who’s already made their decision? Carnahan milks the tension, letting glances linger and conversations curdle, playing each character off the others with a sharp, almost sadistic patience.
Even the title carries a loaded specificity. In Miami police parlance, “the rip” refers to the act of seizing illicit cash, drugs, or weapons – literally taking the bad guy’s stuff. It’s procedural language, cold and transactional, but in Carnahan’s hands it becomes something more corrosive. The “rip” isn’t just the $24 million sitting in a safehouse; it’s the moment the moral fabric of the team is torn apart. What begins as a lawful confiscation quickly mutates into a test of character, exposing how thin the line really is between doing the job and taking the fall.
When The Rip does finally explode, it does so with purpose. The back half pivots into a more overtly action-driven mode – muscular, chaotic, and grim – but never loses sight of the question at its core: who can you trust when the rules collapse? Steven Yeun, Kyle Chandler, Teyana Taylor, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Sasha Calle form a volatile ensemble, each performance adding another fault line to an already unstable night. It’s less about heroes and villains than survival – emotional, moral, and literal.
Carnahan’s love for ‘70s cop thrillers like Serpico and Prince of the City feels baked into the DNA here, not as imitation but as attitude. The Rip understands that the most compelling action isn’t always a gunfight – sometimes it’s watching relationships quietly disintegrate under fluorescent lights. Despite its streaming-service gloss, this is one of Netflix’s most confidently cinematic thrillers in recent memory: tense, bruising, and unapologetically adult. A reminder that when the right filmmaker and the right actors are trusted to dig into the dirt, something sharp and dangerous can still emerge.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Rip is now available to stream on Netflix.
