How Netflix's Rebel Ridge handles anti-Black racism in policing

There's a new entry into the revenge film genre that is getting a lot of buzz.

Netflix's film Rebel Ridge follows an ex-Marine whose attempt to post bail for his cousin leads him into a web of small-town corruption and ultimately a violent stand-off with the local police chief.

Today on Commotion, culture critics Sarah-Tai Black and David Dennis Jr. join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to review the cop thriller film Rebel Ridge and how well it explores the historic tensions between law enforcement and Black communities.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: David, movies that mine the everyday injustices that Black people face, those are not new to us; we have a lot of those. That said, this movie is getting attention for its very particular approach to this topic. What do you think Rebel Ridge is doing right that makes it kind of feel different than other movies that try to do this?

David: One thing it's doing that is interesting is it's painting the crookedness of the police as something that all police sort of do. Generally when we have these, especially an action movie, where you have these crooked cops, it's like there's just something wrong with this particular station, right? There's something wrong with these cops. They're crooked. They bury evidence. They're part of the cartel, or they do something that is sort of extravagantly evil, right?

But the evil of this police force is that they do procedural things that a lot of police forces do. They steal money without any means to and they redistribute it, and do all this stuff which happens all across the country, all across the world. And so they are painting that as the particular evil thing that the police are doing, without having this plot twist that the police chief is actually running the mob or something like that. It is really entrenched in this real-life corruption that does not feel as corrupt as you usually see in the action movies, in the fact that it's not so histrionic in the bad stuff they do.

Elamin: Watching the first maybe 30 minutes of this movie, you get the sense that it is rooted in a lot of legal information and legal framework. And it's not at all trying to hide that. It's trying to say, here's somebody who knows their rights. And even still, these are the ways the police might be able to abuse those rights.

But then also, Sarah-Tai, there's something interesting about the fact that there is this transition in the movie where it suddenly begins to earn the comparison to Rambo movies. What do you make of the comparison between Rebel Ridge and Rambo as a parallel?

Sarah-Tai: I will say, as a huge fan of First Blood Part II specifically, I don't think Rebel Ridge reaches the heights of delirium that it does, but I definitely see why the comparisons are being made. There's a lot of similarities with First Blood, the first of the Rambo franchise movies. You can also see kernels of Clint Eastwood's archetypal screen characters here as well. And I think what Rebel Ridge is doing with those kind of longstanding tropes of, you know, one moral man versus an immoral majority or like Dennis was referring to, if it's not corruption, it's just bureaucracy in the way of the people's justice, so to speak.

But here we're getting it with a very specifically sociopolitical bent, which is very much rooted in its main character's Blackness and how that Blackness changes how he's going to navigate law enforcement, how he's going to navigate judicial systems, how he's going to be surveilled in certain spaces and things like that. And because of those very much real-life urgent realities, you see him coming from this position of discipline, of a very restrained nonviolence up until a point. He's avoiding all confrontation because that is deadly for Black folks, nevermind non-cooperation.

Elamin: I can't lie to you, that's the part that makes this thing work — the resisting of the confrontation. And the movie, to me, what it does best is building that tension.

There's this thing that you both have alluded to earlier: the idea of balancing being an action movie with sort of being this deep, philosophical and legal exploration of anti-Black police violence and corruption, and then also introducing the idea of justice and vengeance into all of this. David, how do you feel about the way that this movie juggles all those?

David: I think it tries…. A white guy wrote this and a white guy directed this, and that became very clear at the root of it. It felt like a guy who listened to a criminal justice podcast and wanted to make a movie that made himself feel better. At the end, it kind of made me feel like he did something that said, "I did a great. I would have voted for Obama a third time." But what we have here is a situation where the cavalry that comes in is state police. And we have a thing where we have good apples in here, and it's not all cops. It still is copaganda. We have to get to the understanding that we have good police and we have a larger infrastructure that justice here will make will save the day. That rings really, really hollow for me.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.