The Rip: A Review - Damon and Affleck's Generic Netflix Cop Slop

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: So instantly forgettable I am not entirely sure this movie even actually exists.

The Rip, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, is an action thriller about Miami narcotics cops who discover a huge pile of drug money and have to figure out who among them is corrupt.

The film, written and directed by Joe Carnahan, is a Netflix original and hit the streaming service on Friday January 16th.

First off, let me say that in general I am a fan of both Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as individuals, and have enjoyed the majority of work that they’ve done together over the years.

Damon and Affleck, of course, came to prominence in 1997 as writers/stars of the Academy Award winning Good Will Hunting, which is a deliriously compelling film. They didn’t write another film together until 2021’s The Last Duel – directed by Ridley Scott, which they also acted in. The Last Duel was overlooked due to Covid and disappointed many, but I thought it was quite good. Their most recent pairing on-screen was Air (2023) – the story of Nike saving itself by creating the Air Jordan sneaker, which neither of them wrote but which Affleck directed – it was good enough.

Good Will Hunting, The Last Duel and Air are a great, a good, and a decent film respectively, all of which feature, at a minimum, solid performances from Matt and Ben. The most striking thing about all three of these films is that they are well-made films that actually, in one way or another, mean something…and that is a credit to both Matt and Ben’s talent, and more importantly, their artistic integrity.

The Rip is a dramatic detour from the usual Damon and Affleck path as it is a rather thoughtless, tedious, worthless exercise in nothingness and meaninglessness. It is a painfully pedestrian affair that is steeped in the Netflix philosophy of “second-screen viewing”…trust me when I tell that if ever a movie were designed to have you scroll on your phone while watching it, it is The Rip.

The specifics of the plot are so generic as to make an AI bot blush. There’s a rough and tumble Miami Narcotics team whose captain was just murdered, and everyone is now a suspect. Then they go to a drug house and find millions of dollars in cash…do they steal it? Or is it a set up? Who is setting them up? They can trust no one!! Not even themselves!!

Yawn.

If you want to see Matt Damon and Ben Affleck say “ the rip” a lot, watch Affleck smoke some frighteningly feminine looking cigarettes that may or may not be Virginia Slims, see a bunch of absurdly improbable consequence-free action sequences despite being set in a “gritty” realist universe, and be fed a bunch of twists and turns and double-crosses and triple-crosses that don’t make a lick of sense…then The Rip is for you.

The film, like the vast majority of Netflix films, looks like shit. It has a budget of $100 million, bloated mostly because Damon and Affleck’s production company, Artists Equity, demands money up front to cover the equity cast and crew lose in the streaming world – a noble effort. But the film, instead of looking shadowy and sharp – like a noir, looks flat, muddled and hazy, like every other Netflix piece of shit product.

You’re supposed to care about the characters in the movie not because they are well-written and compelling characters – they aren’t, but because they are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. And yet, even though they are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, you really don’t give a shit about them.

Damon and Affleck do well-enough at the kind of move star play-acting that is required for their roles, but this is essentially them sleepwalking through the movie for 113 minutes.

I like Matt Damon a lot, and think he is actually a very under-appreciated actor on top of being a solid movie star, but I couldn’t help but notice that this is the second big streaming service movie he’s made that he essentially gives little to no effort in…the first being 2024’s The Instigators for Apple TV, starring another Affleck…Casey.

The Instigators – also an Artists Equity production, was the same sort of cheap, thoughtless, half-assed movie that The Rip is…and Damon sleepwalks through that one too.

The Instigators was so instantly forgettable I am not entirely sure it even ever really existed. It’s like one of those inconsequential dreams you have in the middle of the night that has no discernible attributes and distinguishable moments or scenes in it and then after waking up from it and going back to sleep you forget everything about it but then when you wake up in the morning you vaguely remember you might have had a dream at one point but you have no recollection of any of it at all…which now that I consider it sounds exactly like with The Rip too.

The Rip is so instantly forgettable that despite having watched it this past weekend I am still not sure it really exists…it may have just been something I heard discussed on an episode of Entourage back in the day (which is something you can say about virtually all of writer/director Joe Carnahan’s films).

It would seem that Damon and Ben Affleck are trying to churn and burn with these rather vapid, vacuous and venal movies in an attempt to build up Artists Equity’s filmography and standing in the industry. Unfortunately for them, and us, these movies are so egregiously insignificant and unexceptional that they are going to drain the hard fought, long-fostered equity they’ve built up with their audience over the years.

It would be one thing if Matt and Ben were failing at making some arthouse, experimental or avant-garde movie in the service of an auteur’s vision and the art of cinema, or some political progressive polemic…but they’re not…they are failing at making cookie-cutter, dime-a-dozen, generic action movies…quite a shameful turn of events.

As for The Rip…if you want to have something on in the background while you doom scroll Instagram or X, then this movie could conceivably be that thing. You won’t miss anything in the movie while scrolling because you won’t care what’s happening anyway…and if you did pay attention, you still wouldn’t really know or care what is going on the movie anyway…so there’s that.

In conclusion, in order to both express my disdain for this film and to also adequately spotlight how incredibly clever I am, I will conclude my review of The Rip thusly…

The Rip? More like R.I.P.

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