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.

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 99 - Air

On this episode, Barry and I don our Air Jordans and go one-on-one to discuss Air, the corporate tale of Nike's rise to basketball dominance directed by Ben Affleck and starring Matt Damon now streaming on Amazon. Topics discussed include Affleck's directing ability, Damon's viability as a movie star, and the lost art of masterful movies made for grown-ups. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 99 - Air

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Air: A Review - Who Knew That Shameless Corporate Ass-Kissing Could Be So Entertaining?

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A rare treat of a well-made movie for grown-ups. Not life changing but undeniably entertaining.

Air, the new movie about Nike’s push to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal in 1984, is, to quote Kris Kristofferson, “partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction”.

The film, which is directed by Ben Affleck and stars Affleck as well as his old buddy Matt Damon, is the rarest of rare things in our current culture in that it’s a movie featuring movie stars, made for grown-ups in which everyone involved is exceedingly competent at what they do.

Ben Affleck’s direction, the cast’s performances, first-time screenwriter Alex Convery’s script and Robert Richardson’s cinematography are all, at a bare minimum, competent and often much more than that. For this reason alone, the film is undeniably entertaining.

It’s a testament to Damon and Affleck’s star power, and the professionalism and skill of everyone involved, that even though viewers know how the story ends, Air is still a compelling and captivating story that at times is remarkably exhilarating and even moving.

Matt Damon is terrific as Sonny Vaccaro, the guy leading the charge to get Michael Jordan to sign up with the then basement-dwelling, third ranked basketball sneaker company, Nike.

Damon has always been a top-notch movie star actor, and he brings all his skill to the fore as the lovable loser Vaccaro. Damon is a pleasant and oddly charming screen presence who effortlessly carries this story from start to finish.

Viola Davis, who plays Michael Jordan’s mom Deloris, is outstanding in her supporting role. With minimal screen time Davis imbues Deloris with a silent authority that dominates the drama. Every time she is on-screen, she is subtly the center of the universe. It would be difficult to imagine a scenario where Davis doesn’t get nominated for an Oscar for this performance.

Ben Affleck is very good too as Phil Knight, the very strange founder of Nike. Affleck is fantastic at being unintentionally funny and if Phil Knight is anything it is unintentionally funny.

Affleck’s direction is solid as well. His decision to not make Michael Jordan a major character in the film, and to not show Jordan’s face, were pretty brilliant as the movie could have easily spun out of control and turned into a rather cheap, made-for-tv type of project with a Jordan imitator joining the festivities.

All that said, there are some things about Air that leave a decidedly bad taste in my mouth.

The first of which is that this movie is undeniably a piece of corporate propaganda and hagiography. This isn’t just a film about American capitalism and corporatocracy, it is a celebration of American capitalism and corporatocracy.

The movie bends the truth to some extraordinary degrees in order to pretend it isn’t celebrating the rather deplorable parts of American capitalism and corporatism symbolized by Nike, and to act like it’s actually a tale about the working man fighting against corporate power.

Jordan is made out to be a pioneer who broke the mold regarding shoe contracts by demanding profit sharing and his mother Deloris makes the case that “young black boys will pay a lot for this sneaker and that money should go to my son!” She also says that workers like Vaccaro, and black athletes endorsing sneakers, are exploited by companies like Nike, and Converse and Adidas and they deserve more of the profits.

This is all well and good and is a nice bit of drama for the film, but the fact that Nike pays slave wages to third world workers in order to make their sneakers goes unsaid and unacknowledged. Also unsaid and unacknowledged is the fact that Nike sell their status symbol shoes at exorbitant prices that are so high that in the 80’s and 90’s they often caused crime and violence by young black men against other young black men in order to get them.

In addition, it is also a bit unnerving that Sonny Vaccaro, who is widely considered by many in the know to be one of the sleaziest people from the amateur basketball scene back in the 70’s and 80’s, is made out to be the good-hearted, kind, lovable hero of the movie.

Vaccaro was a shark who was deeply involved in all sorts of shady shit back in the day, and to see him in the film and in the film’s prologue, portrayed as the champion of the good, the noble and the right is a bit much.

There’s an interesting monologue in the film about the Bruce Springsteen song “Born in the USA”, which was enormously popular in 1984. The song, which was co-opted by Reagan as a flag-waving theme song, is actually a lament about the brutal decline of America, but because its morose lyrics are accompanied by the energized music of an uber-patriotic anthem, the song’s meaning gets lost and its artistic power usurped.

It could be that Affleck uses the “Born in the USA” monologue to let astute viewers know that he is trying to hide his critique of the insidious nature of American capitalism and corporatocracy in plain sight in this hagiography. I’d like to think so…but Air feels too weak in its criticisms and too vociferous in its praise of Nike (and all that it represents) to pass that test, and thus feels like just the anthem part of “Born in the USA” without the existential lament at its core.  

The reality is that Air is really a movie about marketing that is itself a piece of marketing. The film, with its fantastic soundtrack of 80’s music, looks and feels like a two-hour commercial for Nike. In this way it is almost an extension of The Last Dance, the ten-hour Michael Jordan docu-series that was so gloriously received by everyone but me back in 2020. That docu-series was shameless legend cultivation and brand buttressing of Michael Jordan and was produced by…you guessed it…Michael Jordan. But our culture is so enamored and addicted to narcissistic self-promotion and propaganda, that no one cared they were being fed a piece of self-serving bullshit.

Speaking of shameless marketing and self-promotion, it is strange that Damon and Affleck are out pounding the pavement selling this movie and pretending this is their first reunion film since their smash hit Good Will Hunting back in 1997, for which they won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Damon and Affleck’s last actual on-screen and writing credit reunion was Ridley Scott’s underrated 2021 film The Last Duel. The Last Duel was overlooked by audiences and snickered at by critics, but I thought it was very good, so to see Damon and Affleck pretend like it doesn’t exist is somewhat bizarre…but makes sense in terms of marketing as the Damon-Affleck reunion card is being played again. As they say, everything old is new again…apparently even on-screen reunions that already happened two-years ago.  

Also a bit odd is the fact that this movie is the first from Damon and Affleck’s production company Artists Equity, which is all about paying workers above and below the line fairly and with equity in the film.

That the narrative of Air somewhat reflects the business model of Artists Equity is clever, as is Affleck talking up how he looked out for first time screenwriter Convery and promised him he’d get full credit despite some rewrites.

But that “looking out for the working man” narrative feels like window dressing when the movie it is placed in is an embarrassing ass-kissing of sweatshop masters Nike made by the deplorable demons at Amazon. I mean…yikes…you’d be hard pressed to find two companies as destructive to working people and our culture as Nike and Amazon. This insidious approach is somewhat reminiscent of the Best Picture winner Nomadland, which told a tale of the working poor on the fringes of society yet disgustingly managed to portray Amazon - which is well-known for its abuse of workers and labor practices, as a friend to the working man and wonderful worker’s paradise.

And yet, despite the rather repulsive pro-corporation politics and economics on display in the movie, Air is an irresistibly entertaining and unrelentingly enjoyable movie, which is a testament to Affleck and Damon’s talent and star power.

In conclusion, Air is in rarified air in that it’s a movie for grown-ups that features movie stars confidently filling up the big screen. I highly recommend it and can guarantee that while it won’t change your life, it will definitely leave you satisfied.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023