‘When’s the last time you guys caught a cop killer in a conference room?‘
I’d watch Ben Affleck and Matt Damon do literally anything for 113 minutes. Eat lunch. Play pickleball. Walk their dogs. If any Hollywood producers are reading this, I have trademarked all of these ideas. So, it was inevitable I would be all in on The Rip, the latest collaboration between possibly my two favourite actors of all time. And, it’s a lot of fun…
Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Damon) and Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Affleck) find themselves in deep shit when they stumble across a stash house with millions of dollars inside. With the Miami Police Department mired in scandal, nobody knows who they can trust. Steven Yeun and Teyana Taylor lead the supporting cast.
Because Damon and Affleck are cool as shit, they’ve basically spent most of the promotion cycle for this film explaining why they hate Netflix (despite this being very much a Netflix production). Damon went viral for explaining that the streaming service demands that the characters explain the plot of the movie at regular intervals to account for people who are on their phones while watching. What a fucking depressing world we live in. Anyway, despite all of that, Damon and Affleck are great here; they’re great together (as one would imagine), and I fully enjoyed spending a couple of hours in their company. Writer-director Joe Carnahan is very much a 7/10 director (he’s the jobbing director behind Smokin’ Aces, The Grey and Boss Level), and that’s what we have here – a popcorn flick that is great whilst you’re watching it, but one that will leave absolutely zero lasting impression whatsoever. In some ways, it’s a shame that Damon and Affleck couldn’t find something a little meatier to collaborate on, but the scenes they share truly are electric. I sincerely hope we see them together many more times before either one of them dies or I die or the world is destroyed by a nuclear war.
If you like this kind of thing, The Rip has loads to enjoy about it. It’s not the kind of thing I’d usually go for but… You know… Ben Affleck. Matt Damon. Need I say more?
