The Rip released on Netflix on January 16.
Directed by Joe Carnahan, it stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in lead roles.
The Rip leans into the pleasures of a tightly wound, well-paced cops-under-pressure narrative.
There are two kinds of people in this world: unserious fans of serious cinema and serious fans of unserious cinema (do not let the serious fans of serious cinema find out about them!). The latter kind has been complaining lately about the lack of genuinely fun, well-written, well-acted flicks that goes beyond following a formula and refuses to insult the audiences’ intelligence. Joe Carnahan’s The Rip seems to have taken note of that sentiment and swooped in to fill the void. The Rip also reunites Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, whose chemistry and bromance are still topnotch.
As you sift through the buzzy, heavy-duty offerings all lined up for awards season (from the 2025 Hamnet to Sentimental Value), this is sometimes the kind of fare you want to turn to on a weekend night, with friends and a bucket of popcorn. The fact that The Rip is headlined by the Oscar-winning BFF duo from Good Will Hunting (1997) makes things less pedestrian even with all the generic shootout and chase sequences to boot.
In another era, The Rip would have been a loud theatrical release. Instead, it arrives on Netflix, emblematic of a moment where mid-budget, non-IP cinema (not a remake or a reboot) can barely exist. Ironically, Netflix’s eagerness to get the film made resulted in a rare win for labour: through Artist Equity, Damon and Affleck’s production company, cast and crew reportedly receive bonuses tied to the film’s performance. It’s a small but meaningful intervention in an industry that increasingly asks everyone except the stars to survive on goodwill.
Working from a story Carnahan developed with Michael McGrale, The Rip is an action thriller that knows exactly what it is and, crucially, what it is not trying to be. It does not aspire to reinvent the genre or cloak itself in prestige aesthetics. Instead, it leans into the pleasures of a tightly wound, well-paced cops-under-pressure narrative—the kind that used to reliably show up in theatres in the late ’90s and early 2000s and has since become an endangered species.
Damon and Affleck play officers in the Miami-Dade Police Department’s narcotics unit, as part of a specialised team whose internal trust begins to fracture after a raid uncovers an enormous cache of cartel cash. When their captain is murdered and rumours of crooked cops begin circulating, paranoia runs high. What follows is a slow tightening of the screws, where every glance, withheld detail and offhand lie feels potentially fatal.
This is, on the surface, a very male movie, but it is not necessarily macho in the toxic sense of the way. The core cast is mostly white men. But the characters who sit outside that centre—women, people of colour—are not reduced to straw figures or lazy stereotypes. Teyana Taylor’s Detective Numa Baptiste is written as competent and clear-eyed rather than ornamental; Catalina Sandino Moreno’s Lolo Salazar is allowed anxiety, anger and agency; and Sasha Calle’s Desi, a civilian pulled into the chaos by circumstance, is treated as neither naïve victim nor femme fatale. Steven Yeun, meanwhile, brings a quiet volatility to Mike Ro.
What The Rip does particularly well is pepper its pulp thrills with grounded, almost banal realities of police work that rarely make it into glossy action cinema. The pay is bad. Overtime barely exists. The job is fundamentally thankless. There’s a low hum of distrust—not just between cops and civilians, but among cops themselves. The film understands how greed doesn’t always emerge from cartoonish evil, but from a very real place of dearth, resentment and exhaustion. When characters begin contemplating the unthinkable, it feels less like a genre contrivance and more like a logical and very human escalation.
Carnahan’s direction is distinct. He prioritises letting tension build through spatial awareness and performance. The film largely unfolds in dimly lit confined spaces—houses, vehicles, quiet neighbourhoods that feel ominously emptied out—and the sense of being watched or boxed in never quite dissipates. The escalation is steady, old-fashioned and deeply satisfying if you’re someone who misses commercial thrillers that trusted audiences to keep up.
The Rip is a movie that understands momentum, stakes and the pleasure of watching good actors bounce off one another. The leads bring a tightly coiled intensity that keeps you hooked. Their chemistry does real narrative work, grounding the film’s emotional spine even as allegiances shift.
This might not be a movie that will dominate discourse or inspire thinkpieces. What it will do instead is remind you that commercial genre films can be competent and satisfying without being disposable. And at this strange cultural moment—where so much mainstream entertainment feels algorithmically hollow or unnecessarily convoluted—that counts for something. Could the success of The Rip change sentiments at Netflix finally? That is something one can only hope for.
