January is considered by the Hollywood system as the dumping ground: the time of year when not many people are likely to spend money at the movies, so they put out the things they have no faith in doing well at the box office. With that in mind, one would think that streaming services like Netflix would be immune to such a practice, since their revenue system doesn’t depend upon box office returns. However, as Netflix and other streaming platforms are slowly becoming the new Hollywood, it seems they are adapting the same annoying practices and habits that made people turn away from Tinsel Town in the first place.
Today’s subject, The Rip, is a prime example of a dumping ground movie, along with being a massive disappointment, especially given the pedigree of everyone involved. You have a star-studded cast, an interesting idea for a story, and a talented director who deserves to be taken more seriously than he is. Sadly, despite all of those promising elements, The Rip is a repetitive, dull, aimless, slog of a film with stock macho characters, adolescent dialogue, lazy action scenes, and probably the ugliest cinematography I have ever seen! And this was filmed on one of Sony’s best cameras!
What passes for a story (inspired by true events) follows a group of Miami cops who specialize in hunting down Cartel stash houses and seizing their assets for evidence. One night, their leader receives a tip about a stash house worth a little over $100K. Once they enter the house and find the hidden stash, they discover it’s worth significantly more; as in enough to fear for their lives more. As they proceed with their duty, counting the cash on sight before handing it over to their superiors, some of the crew begin to question their partners motivations and actions, building up to an eventual showdown between Cartel enforcers, corrupt cops, and the struggle to maintain audience investment. Guess which one they loose first?
On the surface, this sounds like a great idea for a film: you’ve got a group of people who have reasons to doubt each other handling a dangerous task in a confined space with a massive ticking clock over their heads, while contending with determining who is trustworthy, and rather or not any of their struggles is worth their lives. It’s a classic story about duty, corruption, temptation, and justice; one that has been done many times over and with better execution than this train wreck!
The writing is on par with a teenage boy in a creative writing class trying to sound edgy by throwing in as many “F” bombs as possible; the characters, despite being brought to life by admittedly energetic performances, are one-dimensional with little to no texture to them; and the director, Joe Carnahan, seems to have left his skills at the door; the same guy who delivered amazing and entertaining action classics such as 2010’s The A-Team and The Grey.
And then there’s the cinematography. Photographed by Juanmi Azpiroz, The Rip appears to have fallen into the same trap as many modern digitally captured movies: relying too much on the sensitivity of the camera sensor to recover details in dimly lit environments rather than properly lighting dark scenes. As a result, many of the shots in the film look as flat and bland as any other modern digitally captured film taking too much advantage of High Dynamic Range. This is not meant to imply that these technological advancements in cameras are terrible or impractical, not at all; merely that they are rarely (if ever) utilized properly in modern cinematic executions.
Plus, I don’t know if this is because of the improper use of High Dynamic Range, or due to the extreme compression of streaming (likely both), but there were far too many instances of shots struggling to distinguish shadows from dimly lit skin tones, resulting in some kind of magical black sludge constantly appearing and vanishing on everyones heads. It just goes to prove that even films captured with the highest amount of data is still subject to the computers inability to calculate an images true black value; something that typically isn’t a problem with properly lit scenes.
The Rip should have been so much better than it is! It’s disheartening to begin the new year with such a dull, lazy, mishandled mess of a film, especially since we’re already dealing with so many others in real life; they don’t need to invade our entertainment as well! While the film gains a few bonus points for having a relevant story and professional performances (mostly), nothing else here is worth anyones time. This is yet another piece of white noise to play in the background while folding laundry, just don’t play it if you have kids in the house.
Skip this one entirely!
Ladies & gentlemen, I am TheNorm; thank you all for reading.
