Give The Rip a chance

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are back, baby, once again collaborating on a film. Only this one, they did not write nor is Affleck directing, it comes from filmmaker Joe Carnahan, who specializes in well executed schlock like Narc, The Grey, and Copshop. His latest film, reuniting Affleck and Damon, is called The Rip, and it’s about shady cops caught up in some kind of thing over $20 million dollars they may or may not be stealing.

The teaser for The Rip dropped this morning, and it looks cool. Just cool. It has big stars—Damon and Affleck are joined by Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler, Nestor Carbonell, Scott Adkins, and Sasha Calle—and it looks like the kind of tight, tense action Carnahan is so good at delivering. At no point does The Rip look like a January movie, let alone a Netflix movie, yet it is both of things, coming to Netflix exclusively in January. I know this is where we’re at right now, that Netflix—and streaming, in general—is part of the landscape and they will make movies for their platform just like “HBO Films” has long been a thing. Hell, one of Matt Damon’s best performances was for an HBO movie, Behind the Candelabra. 

But especially right now, freshly out of TIFF and having seen over a dozen films in theaters, it just makes me sad that movies like The Rip don’t get that chance. This looks fun! It looks like the kind of action-crime flick that gets an audience in a rip-roaring good mood! Joe Carnahan has been successful at delivering that kind of hit before! I saw two heist flicks at TIFF, Tuner and Fuze, and both benefitted from being seen with an audience, where collective experience and shared emotion heightened the experience of the film itself.

Alas, The Rip will have no such experience. It’s a movie clearly made for a crowd, but ultimately, Netflix bought it for distribution. This is part of the equation, too, that traditional distributors won’t take chances on films like The Rip anymore, not even when they feature huge stars like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. I’m sure the failure of Wolfs, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, did not help.

This makes me worried for Tuner, which is the most fun—and one of the best—movie I saw at TIFF. It doesn’t have a release date yet, it should be seen by a crowd, but if Affleck and Damon can’t get their crime drama in front of crowds anymore, what chance does an emerging talent like Leo Woodall, who is not yet a household name, have? We’ll see, I guess. In the meantime, when the January doldrums roll around, at least we’ll have something to watch while we fold laundry.