It is a small scandal that Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Crest in a cinema. Lightning fast, scarily tight and incredibly entertaining, Rebel Crest Saulnier continues to establish itself as one of the best genre filmmakers of his generation and perhaps by far the best film I’ve seen this year, even if I had to watch it in my basement. (The film, produced and distributed by Netflix, will stream exclusively on the platform.)
The plot of Rebel Crest is as lean and muscular as its protagonist Terry Richmond, played by British actor Aaron Pierre in a performance that would make him a superstar. In the film’s opening scene, Terry is riding his bicycle toward the rural town of Shelby Springs, Alabama, when he is deliberately hit by a police car. Two white police officers haze him and briefly detain him. They also confiscate $36,000 in cash Terry is carrying as part of a civil asset forfeiture. $10,000 of that is to help bail out his cousin, who is currently being held in the Shelby Springs jail on a minor drug possession charge. (If $10,000 seems like an absurdly high bail amount for someone caught with weed, you’re on the right track.)
This encounter lasts less than eight minutes, but is the inciting incident for the rest of the film. Terry wants to get his cousin out of jail, and Terry wants his money back. Terry is also, as we quickly learn in a mischievously funny reveal, a former Marine and martial arts expert. As he gradually escalates his offensive against the Shelby Springs police and their corrupt and domineering chief, the wonderfully named Sandy Burnne (a great Don Johnson), he is soon joined by Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb), a court clerk who has had her own run-ins with the rotten city power structure. As Terry and Summer dig deeper into the city’s web of corruption, the stakes rise, alternately by the heavily armed and increasingly desperate cops on one side and Terry’s muscular one-man wrecking squad on the other.
If this all sounds rather rote or familiar, Saulnier’s cinematography saves the film from cliches at every possible pitfall. An absurdly gifted thriller producer who previously directed the indie cult favorites Blue Ruin (2014) and Green Room (2016), Saulnier (who also wrote the screenplay and edited the film) and his cinematographer David Gallego skillfully weave a series of tracking shots and other, more jerky camera movements to create a visual atmosphere of sustained relentlessness that perfectly sets off Pierre’s powerful performance. This is action filmmaking at its finest; watching Saulnier’s film, you almost get the feeling that everyone involved loves their work.
As a pure genre exercise, Rebel Crest would be an exquisite work, but what makes the film stand out even more is its extraordinary intelligence and conscientiousness. There are racial tensions – Terry is black, most of his cop antagonists are white, this is rural Alabama – that a lesser film might have reduced to cliche or drained to the point of melodrama. Instead, Saulnier lets this largely flow beneath the surface of the film, peeking out in moments like the persistent insinuations from Terry’s tormentors that he is a drug dealer, or Chief Burnne’s condescending insistence that Terry call him “sir.”
What Rebel Crest What interests us most, and what the film explores with surprising depth and care, is civil asset forfeiture itself, a process that allows law enforcement to confiscate money and property from people merely suspected of criminal activity. In recent years, civil asset forfeiture (and the rampant corruption that enables it) has been the subject of growing outrage on both the left and the libertarian right, but the issue is so byzantine that it rarely enters everyday political discourse. Rebel Crest describes the glaring injustices of this practice in a way that is piercingly clear without feeling didactic or overly didactic. A film about civil forfeiture could easily have become an exposition fest with characters explaining the intricacies of the law to each other, but Rebel Crest miraculously avoids this – one of his finest performances and the most refreshing touch of originality in this blatantly derivative film.
If you are an action movie fan of a certain age, you may have already concluded that Rebel Crest bears a strong resemblance to 1982 First bloodan inspiration that Saulnier openly admitted. 42 years after its publication First blood is today primarily known as the first film of the bombastic militaristic Rambo franchise, but it’s actually a far more interesting film than the images of a glittering, machine gun-wielding Sylvester Stallone that graced lunchboxes and video game covers in the late ’20s.th Century suggests. First blood tells the story of former Green Beret and Vietnam War veteran John Rambo, who moves through the Pacific Northwest and is unable to hold down a job due to his PTSD. When he arrives in the small town of Hope, he is arrested by a police chief who doesn’t like his long hair, and then brutalized in prison by the town’s sadistic cops. Rambo escapes, and from there, things spiral out of control. For much of the running time First blood is an atmospheric and surprisingly profound film about American hypocrisy and the alienation of war veterans, right up to the final act, which degenerates into an absurd orgy of destruction, punctuated by a Rambo monologue that’s an eye-rolling mishmash of right-wing Reagan-era Vietnam revisionism.
At the risk of spoiling it, Rebel CrestThe end does not follow the traces of First bloodwhich will surely disappoint some viewers who crave a bloodbath. I admit that I was surprised myself – Saulnier’s Green Room is one of the most masterfully violent films I’ve ever seen, and some of these cops are just as vicious as the Nazi punks in the earlier film. As viewers, we want our pound of flesh, and we want Terry to want his too. As for Saulnier, the filmmaker confessed in an interview with Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi that he sought the challenge of writing a film that didn’t end with everyone dead.
And yet the film’s relative lack of spectacular violence is a creative coup in itself. Like John Rambo, Terry Richmond is a man who has mastered violence and is searching for peace – “You shed the first blood, not me,” Rambo declares in the moment of his film when Leo points to the screen. But in Saulnier’s film, the relatively brief demonstrations of Terry’s skills create their own gripping sense of constantly looming danger. He is a human weapon who mostly stays sheathed, but only partially. It also makes Terry a more compelling protagonist, as a man battling against his most basic instincts: Rambo’s rampage at the end of First blood actually makes the character far fewer more interesting than at the beginning of the film, even though it lays the foundation for the upcoming franchise.
But make no mistake, when Saulnier and Pierre Terry let go completely, the results are spectacular: a scene near the end of the film at the Shelby Springs police station is the most exciting fight sequence you’ll see this year. Rebel Crest is that rarest thing there is, an action thriller with brains, heart and guts, an electrifying and crowd-pleasing work of cinematic art, pulp art at its finest. It’s the kind of film that cinemas were invented for. Since we can’t have that, call your friends and watch the thing on the biggest, loudest screen you can find. find.
