MOVIE REVIEW – Joe Carnahan comes roaring back to the kind of gritty, nerves-on-fire crime filmmaking that first put him on the map. The Rip isn’t interested in being flashy – it’s interested in tightening the screws, scene after scene, until the whole thing feels like it might snap. And with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck at the center, it plays like a bruised, old-school cop thriller that remembers the genre used to have teeth.

Carnahan delivers a razor-edged, high-tension crime thriller that’s built with real discipline. It fits his trajectory: after breaking out with the brutally effective Narc (2002), he spent years flirting with louder, slicker genre fare (The A-Team reboot in 2010; Boss Level in 2020). Here, he returns to the hard-ground stuff – a stripped-down, ’70s-flavored pressure-cooker thriller that lives and dies on atmosphere, moral rot, and momentum.

These Cops Aren’t Heroes – They’re Survivors

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck – also producing via their Artists Equity banner – slip effortlessly into the kind of long-running screen partnership that doesn’t need to prove itself anymore. (Do we like them together? Very much.) Damon plays Lieutenant Dane Dumars; Affleck is Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne, both working narcotics in the Miami Police Department. They’re tough, tired, and worn down in a way that reads less like movie grit and more like accumulated damage. When we meet them, they look like they’ve wandered in from The Wire, lamenting how “real police work” has become a myth while grieving their colleague, friend, and possible lover Jackie Velez (Lina Esco), killed in a vicious pre-title shooting. And just to keep the anxiety constant, Internal Affairs and federal agents are already sniffing around, convinced the killer may have come from inside the department.

The setup promises a proper old-school potboiler, the kind of cop drama you’d associate with Sidney Lumet or Michael Mann. Then the fuse gets lit. Dumars receives a tip about a cartel-connected house supposedly hiding an enormous stash of drug money. The team investigates with visible reluctance – and almost immediately everything goes sideways. From that point on, The Rip turns into a siege movie. Carnahan’s script is twisty without being gimmicky, dropping reveals and reversals that keep shifting the ground under your feet. The tone lands somewhere between Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing: claustrophobic danger, escalating violence, and paranoia spreading like smoke through a sealed room.

Everyone’s A Suspect – And That’s The Engine

The tension is the movie’s fuel, but Carnahan also understands he’s making a cop thriller in a post-hero era. He nods directly at how policing is viewed differently now than it was in the genre’s heyday. “We gotta close ranks,” Dumars says – a line that hits like a familiar institutional reflex: silence, solidarity, the instinct to shield the badge. In the background, the film threads in talk of powerful police unions keeping problem officers employed, then quietly moving them elsewhere, like consequences are just paperwork.

That ethical sludge is what makes The Rip so watchable. The film keeps pushing the same ugly questions: who’s dirty, who’s clean, and who’s simply better at looking clean? How strictly will anyone follow the book when the stakes become existential? Because there’s a real clock here, not a metaphorical one – cartel soldiers are on the way with machine guns, and once they arrive, the story stops being about procedure and becomes about survival.

Dumars wears the theme on his hands: tattooed initialisms across his fingers, “A.W.T.G.G.” and “W.A.A.A.W.B.” – “Are we the good guys?” and “We are and always will be.” At first they play like slogans of reassurance, a kind of moral anchor. By the end, they read more like denial – and the shift is one of the film’s nastier little turns of the knife.

The Third Act Gets Louder – Not Necessarily Better

It’s not accurate to say the film completely runs out of gas in the final stretch, but it does change texture. Once the big reveals land and the suspense starts to lift, the earlier pleasures don’t hit quite as hard. A final frantic car chase and a long shootout push the movie into more familiar genre territory – effective, but less distinctive than the paranoid siege mechanics that came before.

Still, this is strong work – not a full-blown masterpiece, but closer than most modern crime thrillers. Tight, mean, and gripping, with Damon and Affleck giving the material the kind of lived-in weight it needs. A zig-zagging, old-school potboiler with enough bite to remind you why this genre used to feel dangerous.

-Herpai Gergely „BadSector”-