The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).
It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Miami police department. Damon plays Lieutenant Dane Dumars, recently promoted to boss of the Tactical Narcotics Team, which includes Sergeant JD Byrne (Affleck). Byrne’s brother, Del (Scott Adkins), is an FBI agent, and his suspicions about corruption inside the Miami PD have brought him into violent conflict with JD. Emotions in the department are running at fever pitch, following the murder of TNT boss Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco), cold-bloodedly shot by masked gunmen. The Feds have even suggested that she may have been killed by a fellow cop.
JD is taking this especially badly since he and Velez had been having an affair, but it was also Velez who had been on the trail of a cartel “stash house”, potentially hiding a huge wad of cash. She hadn’t dug out all the details, but when Dumars gets a text message revealing the location of just such an establishment, the team go into overdrive.
The house in question is a down-at-heel residence in the Hialeah district. Its sole inhabitant is Desi Molina (Sasha Calle), who says she only moved in recently after inheriting the house from her grandmother. The cops aren’t buying it, and with the aid of photogenic beagle Wilbur, a highly-trained money-sniffing dog (pictured above), they discover a colossal trove of cash behind the walls in the attic. Having anticipated a sum in the region of $300k, they’re flabbergasted to find it all adds up to about $20m.
Clearly this is no ordinary find, and more than one of Dumars’ squad feels sorely tempted to take the money and run. Indeed, detectives Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor, both pictured below) conduct a somewhat philosophical conversation on this topic. It seems the owners of the cash anticipated this, and they told Desi (who obviously knows a lot more about this than she’s letting on) to offer a share of the loot to buy off anybody who happened to find it.
Tension mounts as the team get a suspicious visit from a Hialeah police patrol car. Then an anonymous phone call tells Dumars’ team that they have 30 minutes to vacate the premises before they’ll be wiped out. The whole neighbourhood has previously been in darkness, but suddenly all the street lights are switched on. One particular light flashes the word PIGS in morse code. Then suddenly the house is raked with a deluge of automatic gunfire...
Looks like our team are in a critical spot, but there are plenty of fiendish twists and reversals to come. Nothing is what it seems, black may well be white, and on this evidence you can understand why many citizens feel reluctant to trust a policeman. It’s nail-biting stuff, and well worth 112 minutes of your time.
Add comment