‘The Rip’ Review: A Team of Miami Cops Are Tempted to Steal $20 Million in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Enjoyably Aggro Netflix Heist Movie

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. A shouty and self-serious action thriller about a team of ambiguously corrupt Miami cops who threaten to turn on each other after they discover a fortune of very stealable cartel money hidden in an unassuming safe house, Joe Carnahan’s “ The Rip ” would be easy to dismiss as run-of-the-mill streaming fare if not for the casting wrinkle that juices up its drama at every juncture. To put it simply: Ben Affleck plays one cop. Matt Damon plays another. They love each other, albeit only in a pathologically straight let’s bark hyper-steroidal sub-“Heat” jargon at each other while swallowing our feelings sort of way. But over the course of a dark and deadly night in the suburbs of Hialeah, the relationship between these ride-or-die bros will fray apart as those giant buckets full of benjamins - the titular “rip” - start to cloud the latter’s judgment. Tense as the situation is on its own, the whole thing is kicked up a notch by the sick meta spectacle of watching Hollywood’s bestest friends begin to sour into mortal enemies. It just hits different when Ben and Matt are trying to bring each other down, and “The Rip” takes full advantage of the palpable history between them from its first proper scene all the way through the last and most ridiculous of its (way too many) different endings. The suspicions kick off with a murder-mystery that will hover over the rest of Carnahan’s script, as the captain of a Tactical Narcotics Team is gunned down by two masked shooters for reasons unknown. Her team doesn’t take it well. Quoth Detective Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor in a small, functional role that she unsurprisingly imbues with life): “She was my friend. And my bitch.” She was also Detective Sergeant JD Byrne’s fuck buddy, so he’s extra steamed about the murder as well, and hellbent on figuring out whether his captain was killed by one of their own (Affleck is great at playing aggro with a conscience, and, as we learn in the most gratuitous one-shot male shirtless scene this side of “Ant-Man,” also shredded to the bone). It’s the only thing JD cares still about, and we believe him when he says that Damon’s increasingly disaffected Lieutenant Dane Dumars deserved the recent promotion that both men were vying for. Dane has a dead son, he needs something to live for, and JD is the kind of guy who cares about balancing the scales of justice to whatever degree he can. “The Rip” doesn’t offer any particularly sharp insights about the moral dilemmas faced by Miami’s finest (Carnahan’s lean and hardy screenplay is less interested in big picture ideas than in getting a weary Damon to say things...

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