Revenge Revisited

by Miles Klee

[Spoilers follow.]

Toward the end of the bloated John Wick: Chapter 4, as our titular gunman battles his way through a multitude of nameless henchmen to climb the three hundred steps to the Sacré-Coeur in Paris not once but twice (he is sent tumbling down to the bottom after a first attempt), it becomes painfully clear how unsuitable this character was for an extended franchise. You can’t really blame audiences, I suppose, for liking Keanu Reeves and wanting, again and again, to see him take on an entire underworld like some kind of invincible video-game avatar—he got thrown off a damn building in the prior installment—but come on. The diminishing returns of the series are only momentarily concealed by visual witticisms like the compensatory martial arts style of a blind master hitman, or Wick dispatching a seven-foot-tall attacker with a library book. 

There is the discomfort, too, of becoming inured to the relentless yet sanitized gun violence in movies, particularly as numbness to shootings in the U.S. has contributed to our national failure to curtail them. It’s one problem of several that extend to the greater action subgenre spawned by John Wick, in which villains reliably Fuck Around With The Wrong Guy and learn of his mythical gift for exacting punishment, typically chalked up to a past life of elite training, black ops, warzone experience, etc. We are always denied the suspense of following an ordinary person pushed to extremes, à la Die Hard: in these stories, the wronged party must reveal a past that justifies their implacable momentum and persuades us they cannot lose. The result is mass death that feels meaningless.    

Rebel Ridge, the latest film by Jeremy Saulnier, released on Netflix in September, is an electrifying subversion of these tropes, and it’s a shame we couldn’t watch its intellectual but no less brawny approach dominate on the big screen. We open with the inciting incident, as Terry Richmond (a smoldering Aaron Pierre) bikes along a rural road and is run down by police officers who handcuff and search him on no real pretext whatsoever, discovering that he has $36,000 in cash in his backpack. Richmond, while trying to remain a model of compliance as his rights are so casually violated, explains that he is traveling into town to post bail for his cousin. The officers, baselessly speculating that he might have procured the money by criminal means, avail themselves of the means to seize it—civil asset forfeiture—while releasing him without charges. From then on, Richmond is locked in an escalating conflict with the police department.