Review: The Rip (2026)

In the wake of expensive auteur dramas that didn’t land them the Oscar they wanted, or big-budget movies that never felt like true blockbusters, Netflix seems to have course-corrected with ideal streaming pictures such as The Rip. Middle-budget, genre-focused, with big stars doing gritty, satisfying work, The Rip is very much a streaming picture, but like Carry-On from 2024, it also feels like a throwback, in this case to early 2000s cop dramas. It’s not great cinema, but it is pulpy cinema, which I’ll take over a lot of the bland streaming slop you find nowadays.

Written and directed by Joe Carnahan, who gave us Narc (2002) and The Grey (2011), the film is tried-and-true “copagandha” that’s simultaneously self-serious and goofy. It’s appropriately tense throughout, and well-acted by its big name cast, which includes Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in the starring roles, and Steven Yeun, Kyle Chandler, and Teyana Taylor in support. Carnahan knows there’s a lot of pleasure to be found in watching charismatic actors in a well-trodden genre scenario—the crooked cop thriller, in this case. So Carnahan lets them cook in this potboiler about a drug money seizure in the Miami suburbs—a “rip” in cop parlance—which turns out to be way larger than anticipated. They show up late on a Friday to grab 100K from a stash and discover around $20 million hidden in the attic walls of a suburban home owned by a Colombian-American (Sasha Calle).

Who tipped them off to the rip? Why is it so much more than anticipated? And is one of these police officers crooked, namely Matt Damon’s hardass lieutenant, who seems on edge because of a colleague’s murder in the film’s early moments? Carnahan and company generate a lot of tension in the earlygoing, when the cops have to count the cash by hand, working against an invisible ticking clock as they know the longer they spend in the house, the greater risk of some cartel thugs showing up to get their cash back.

Carnahan channels his past self as well as other Latino-obsessed white guy directors, such as David Ayer, by shooting the entire film with a tungsten sheen that seems to imagine that every hood in locales such as Miami is full of bad hombres ready to unload on the cops. However, Carnahan does well to use the camera to restrict our information and amplify our questions. When a character such as Affleck’s hothead sergeant or Yeun’s by-the-books detective wanders off into the shadows, Carnahan likes to play with our expectations and imagination by emphasizing their absence from the frame. Since we cannot see what they’re doing, is it possible they’re doing something wrong?

In this way and others, The Rip functions as a whodunnit. The tension, guessmaking, and convoluted resolution to the plotting all share as much with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films or Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries as they do with other cop films. There’s even a dialogue-heavy, closed-room deduction scene where secrets are revealed that would be right at home in an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes story.

Also like so many whodunnits, the film’s resolution pulls the tension out of the scenario and leaves us with some unsatisfying answers. The Rip continues a few scenes too long past the mystery’s resolution so it can hit home a few points about loyalty and trauma—Carnahan mainstays. Carnahan is too sentimental to let well enough alone with some of his characterizations, which is why Damon’s character is constantly looking at photos of his dead kid (echoes of Neason’s dead wife in The Grey), or why the camera is fixated on his knuckle tattoos: AWTGG and WAAWB. The left knuckle stands for “Are We the Good Guys?,” the central question about cops in the film. The right knuckle is the answer: “We Are and Always Will Be.” The film and character share the simple, self-reflective question and the same macho answer. Such a gesture sums up The Rip, both its appealing self-seriousness and its limited, sentimental perspective.

6 out of 10

The Rip (2026, USA)

Directed by Joe Carnahan; written by Joe Carnahan, based on a story by Joe Carnahan and Michael McGrale; starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Sasha Calle, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, Kyle Chandler.

READ MORE REVIEWS