Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip,” a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is “Miami Vice” territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or “The Town.”
In “Rip,” they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon) says may have $150,000 hidden in the walls. It turns out to be more than $20 million, though, and their mission immediately turns from a Friday afternoon smash-and-grab into an imminent siege where no one can be trusted.
“The Rip” — which debuts Friday, Jan. 16, on Netflix — is a lean and potent-enough neo-noir where almost all the characters are police officers. Yet it’s a mystery as to who’s a good guy and who’s not. It’s a nifty and timely premise, even if “Rip” literally tattoos its message across itself.
When Dane sits down with the young woman (Sasha Calle) at the stash house who seems plausibly innocent, she looks at tattoos on his hands and asks what they mean. On one: “AWTGG”: “Are we the good guys?”
As much as the answer might seem a foregone conclusion in a movie starring Damon and Affleck, who are also producers, “The Rip” plays with and against type in ways that can keep you engrossed. (The cast also includes Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun and Kyle Chandler.)
However, the exposition is so light and hurried that that’s almost all it plays with. We know almost nothing about our characters outside of the action in the movie, making all the potential double crosses ring hollow.
Carnahan opens the film with a flurry of internal interrogations. The Miami police department is full of finger-pointing after the fatal shooting, seen in the movie’s first moments, of a detective (Lina Esco). Cutting quickly between angry accusations and equally furious defensiveness, we get the sense that nobody in the department knows who’s clean and who’s dirty.
