Jeremy Saulnier’s supremely tense new Netflix film Rebel Ridge sits firmly within the motion class. However the place stylized hit actioners just like the John Wick collection or the HiGH&LOW motion pictures get their mileage from over-the-top motion stunts, the throwdowns in Rebel Ridge are easy and streamlined sufficient to really feel solely plausible.
Earlier standout Saulnier motion pictures like Blue Break and Inexperienced Room deal with violence in graphic, gory methods, however they floor bloody battle in actuality. Rebel Ridge has extra of a blockbuster construct than these movies when it comes to its path and its ending. However nonetheless, the fights are, as Saulnier repeatedly put it in a preview with Polygon, consciously and deliberately “sloppy.”
“I can watch an action hero take out an entire building of people, and I’m impressed with the stunt work,” Saulnier says. “The choreography is mind-blowing, and I love taking that ride. But I really don’t feel much. I don’t feel the harrowing nature of what one might experience going up against another human. So with [Rebel Ridge’s] choreography, I was always there to thwart the stunt team’s efforts to make things cooler, bigger, more satisfying. Like, ‘Take it down a notch!’ or ‘I don’t think that would happen!’ I was always there to, like, make it sloppy and awkward.”
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Rebel Ridge.]
Rebel Ridge stars The Underground Railroad’s Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, a Black Marine veteran and martial-arts teacher visiting a small Southern city to bail his cousin out of jail. He’s working on a strict deadline, along with his cousin’s life at stake, however the white native police begin harassing him the second he arrives on the town, stealing his bail cash beneath the pretense of civil asset forfeiture and threatening him with jail or worse if he pushes again.
Terry is a well mannered, cautious, measured man. It’s arduous to look at Rebel Ridge with out pondering of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and different outstanding writing by and about Black parents having “the talk” with their kids about methods to navigate racially charged police encounters. Terry is clearly aware of these dynamics and the significance of maintaining his mood even within the wake of outrageous provocation and open bullying, and but it’s apparent that, in some unspecified time in the future, he’s going to snap and push again in opposition to the injustice and abuse the police are piling on him — notably native police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson).
Your complete film is a protracted, tense wait to see which straw is lastly going to interrupt Terry’s again. And there’s a pure expectation that — like Sylvester Stallone’s related army vet in 1982’s First Blood, coping with equally out-of-bounds small-town policemen — Terry goes to go away a cathartic path of our bodies in his wake when he does lastly cease holding himself in verify.
However Saulnier didn’t need Rebel Ridge to finish with a wave of dramatic neck-snapping and body-pulverizing: He wished “a traditional American action flick, with ideally more artistry.” And he wished Terry to really feel susceptible.
“Aaron and I and the stunt team just worked really hand in hand. I did my research and I’d seen how martial arts disciplines play out in the real world,” Saulnier says. “It comes down to mostly sloppy grappling and just brute force. Certainly there’s an amount of technique and knowledge, but a lot of it is about leverage and position, and not so much fancy moves. Wire work never came into play, except for a couple of things to help take weight off people. I leaned into my strength, which is awkward reality, and through that, a more real battle space, and more real hand-to-hand combat. And through that, to me, to a bigger dramatic payoff — a bigger emotional experience than these sorts of big spectacle films.”
Picture: Netflix
Saulnier laughs a bit in our interview as he means that his stunt crew didn’t absolutely perceive why he was pushing again in opposition to conventional motion till they noticed the completed film. “We finally screened it for the crew down in New Orleans last week, and I think they fully realized what I was going for — the emotionally charged, subjective experience of Terry Richmond carving through, these adversaries,” he says.
“There was one instance where we had some choreography that was pretty awesome, and I was in the edit room looking at it. And I felt very proud of the work we did, as a fan of MMA, and a person who’s researched way more combat than I’d like to admit. But it didn’t feel real. So some of the coolest choreography ended up getting cut, because if it didn’t feel fully true, based on Aaron’s physicality and whoever he’s against, it had to go. Which was painful, but gratifying. The note to the stunt team was like, We are paying homage to so many films, but we need to carve our own path and make this its own genre.”
A part of that huge emotional payoff was giving Terry and his allies within the film a extra optimistic ending than followers of Saulnier’s different work would possibly anticipate. “I do think people will be surprised, when they finally see this movie, at the level of nuance and layers that are there, and the predicaments everybody’s in,” Saulnier says. “Not excusing any sort of behavior, but just gaining understanding of why us humans are in such conflict — and hopefully offering a little catharsis, which is new for me. You know, I’m used to having a dreadful gut-punch of a movie, leaving audiences in a state of shock or dread. And this movie, I think, transcends that bar. We’ve had almost euphoric responses. When you hear people in a theater experiencing this movie together — it’s been really encouraging and bizarrely uplifting.”
Rebel Ridge is streaming on Netflix now.
