Gautam Anand
With the star powers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck front and center, one can’t help but be excited about a mouthwatering cop thriller. The reunion of these two screen legends carries a built-in promise of quality, and initially, the film delivers. Damon and Affleck star as grizzled veterans of the Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) in Miami-Dade PD. After a tip-off leads the squad to a nondescript house, they breach the door expecting a standard bust. Instead, they stumble upon a discovery that changes everything—a massive pile of cash, unguarded and unaccounted for. What follows is supposed to be a tense game of cat and mouse as the officers decide what to do with the money, but the film quickly unravels into something far less coherent.
The Rip starts promisingly. The opening is tense, tactile, and immersive. You are on the edge of your seat as the Tactical Narcotics Team enters this home and discovers a massive pile of cash. The atmosphere is thick with dread, the lighting is moody, and the stakes feel immediately real. Act One? Great. It sets up a moral dilemma that should have powered the rest of the runtime. But the moment the film enters Act Two is when the wheels completely fall off.
Whatever tension was built in the first thirty minutes evaporates, replaced by a narrative mess. Your initial reaction for the next half an hour is of confusion—what exactly is going on? And to be clear, this is not the “good” confusion where you enjoy the riddle, piecing together clues alongside the protagonists. In The Rip, the confusion is complete bewilderment because the plot has gaping holes. Characters make decisions that defy logic, and narrative threads are introduced only to be immediately abandoned.
By the time the third act arrives, you stop caring for the characters. The mystery that seemed so intriguing at the start becomes transparent, and the plot becomes easily guessable. It is a frustrating moment for the viewer: you realize the confusion was not because the plot was too smart; it was because it was too dumb. You are left confused as to how a script with this much talent attached can be so fundamentally broken.
The pacing issues compound the narrative failures. After the final revelation—which lands with a thud rather than a bang—the film continues for another 20 minutes, riddled with bombastic and unimpressive action scenes. It feels endless. I do wonder why filmmakers feel the urge of adding unnecessary action scenes unless they have something unseen before to show. Here, the set pieces are generic and loud, lacking any real geography or stakes. In this movie, it seems like the only reason the filmmakers decided to add action scenes was because, well, they had too much money to spend and a budget of $100 million to justify.
As for the leads, Affleck and Damon look their part. They have the weary, cynical aesthetic of career cops down to a science, and their natural chemistry is still evident in glimpses. However, in a story as insipid as this one, no actor could infuse life. They are stranded in a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, serving a script that mistakes convulsion for plot progression.
The Rip is a frustrating missed opportunity. It takes a golden premise and two of cinema’s best friends and buries them under a mountain of plot holes and expensive, empty noise.
