Clark Neily
Clark Neily
If you haven’t seen the Netflix blockbuster Rebel Ridge, you should. Billed as a Rambo-meets-Jack-Reacher police procedural whose protagonist is triggered by a costly encounter with civil forfeiture that quickly snowballs into brutal conflict with a corrupt rural police department, the film delivers that dopamine-laced punch of catharsis you’re craving.
An added bonus is the vexing authenticity of the initial setup, which features a cascading series of entirely plausible civil-rights violations, threats, prevarications, and broken promises by money-grubbing cops who view citizens as little more than walking ATMs. And when former Marine martial-arts instructor Terry Richmond (played by Aaron Pierre) finally dishes out the full can of Devil Dog whoopass, the action is fast-paced and well-choreographed. You can’t ask for more than that.
Or can you?
Enjoyable and well-executed as this movie was, it felt like a missed opportunity to tell a more authentic—and perhaps more sinister—story about America’s criminal justice system.
The corrupt cops’ ringleader in Rebel Ridge, Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), exudes a miasma of smug menace and latent racism that effectively arouses the audience’s ire and their desire for righteous vengeance. Those feelings are turbocharged when Burnne’s perfidy leads to an avoidable tragedy and the protagonists discover that he has orchestrated a sprawling conspiracy to destroy evidence and deny counsel to detainees in furtherance of his forfeiture-fueled policing-for-profit scheme.
On one level, this is textbook storytelling. The (literally) black-and-white confrontation between good and evil engages the audience emotionally and provides the satisfaction of knowing (with one notable exception) who are the good guys and who are the bad guys—as well as the confidence that everyone on both sides will ultimately get what they deserve.
On another level, however, the over-the-top malignity of Chief Burnne and his minions provides false comfort about the true state of American criminal justice—namely, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/rebel-ridge-effective-fantasy-reality-even-worse