If anyone is making a film about potentially corrupt police officers working in a huge US city, the shadow that Training Day casts on the same genre remains incredibly long. Even two plus decades since its release, that film is to the police crime thriller what Saving Private Ryan is to the war films. That’s why the director of The Rip, Joe Carnahan, didn’t have an easy job in front of him.
In his case, the unity under scrutiny is a narcotics team working in Miami. The same crew is suddenly placed in a tight spot after it raids a property where millions of US dollars are stashed, which are most likely directly connected to a narco cartel. In the night that follows, all bets are off as each of the team’s officers has someone to suspect.
From the get-go, it’s clear that the biggest center of gravity in the film is the relationship between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The duo has been writing modern Hollywood history since the late 1990s, and they can still click together. But the same gravitational pull is also pushing everyone to the other rims of that star-studded solar system. That includes the very important Steven Yeun, but also a number of female characters that almost disappear in the last third of the film.
Here’s where the biggest flaw of The Rip lies. Carnahan apparently didn’t fully decide if there’s too little or too much Damon & Affleck in his film. That’s why it ends up feeling somewhat under-cooked at its end, with several phases of the film that never completely deliver. That doesn’t make The Rip ultimately bad or unentertaining, but it does make it far away in terms of enduring quality from films like Training Day. The comparison might be unfair; however, it is still unavoidable.
