Rebel Ridge

A film like Rebel Ridge reminds us that you can lose yourself in exciting, engaging, stimulating entertainment while still keeping your brain completely on.

The film manages to be both intelligent and visceral.

It’s a muscular, high-octane story about cops living above the laws they’re paid to enforce, and growing more desperate and dangerous with every threat to their unchecked power.

There’s such electricity to Rebel Ridge – I just hope enough people get the chance to feel it.

It’s tougher than it looks to sidestep revenge movie shortcuts and formulaic payoffs while keeping matters engaging. But Saulnier does it. Off-kilter and fresh, Rebel Ridge may frustrate crude expectations, but its satisfactions are many.

Rebel Ridge is consistently precise in tone, theme, and pacing throughout.

This story of corruption and conspiracy in a small Louisiana town might have passed as a taut if familiar action thriller — if it had actually been taut.

What an amazing film! Smart actors, smart characters, smart script. And yeah, some corrupt cops. Don Johnson is such a good villain, Aaron Pierre is such a good hero. Really suspenseful the whole way through, a dozen twists you never see coming.

It’snot a modern Rambo neater a new homeland. There’s to much action missing and the story is not deep enough for a serious thriller

I have now watched two films by Jeremy Saulnier: "Green Room", a precisely shot, beautifully edited movie with a tension-laden atmosphere that becomes increasingly relentless. And "Rebel Ridge", which mostly meanders along but occasionally allows the director's talent to shine **** fact that "Rebel Ridge", a reinterpretation of "First Blood" set in rural Louisiana, moves at a rather sluggish pace is likely due to its runtime being 40 minutes longer than "Green Room". And you can feel it, especially in the middle third. After a strong opening, it feels like an eternity before (the excellent) Aaron Pierre is finally pushed to the brink and things **** could argue that the extended runtime is necessary to make the escalation of violence believable in a modern context. However, if the result is still essentially 'muscle man takes down 20 cops single-handedly', then you can't sell me on the idea of 'realism'. The film doesn’t aim to be over-the-top but still wants to deliver an action-packed one-against-all finale. And for me, this indecisiveness behind the camera is precisely why "Rebel Ridge", despite some genuinely gripping scenes, great characters (Don Johnson is clearly having a blast), and solid action, doesn’t fully hit the mark.Final verdict: It was entertaining despite the runtime, but I’ll never watch it again.

It's the story about a man making his way through a small town minding his own business until the local law enforcement draw first blood. No, we aren't talking about Rambo. When things go south and a friends and family are threatened, the military martial arts expert has to take matters into his own hands. Unfortunately the story is a long slow burn and the action when it hits never really picks up the pace. It is basically Reacher, but not good.

One's suspension of disbelief gets stretched and stretched further as conflicts grows between the entirely good characters and the entirely bad characters in more convoluted and improbable circumstances till you simply stop caring.