Blue Steal: REBEL RIDGE

Those of us with a taste for patiently proportioned action filmmaking, of the sort that’s all the more satisfying for a long fuse, will find much to enjoy with Rebel Ridge. Here’s a blood-boiler of a thriller, percolating with righteous anger as it stokes a steady sense of tension and suspense. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is good at this sort of thing—a slow and steady escalation of inevitable conflict. His fine-tuned Blue Ruin, with a fumbling amateur quest for vengeance, or Green Room, with a rock band besieged by neo-Nazis, show a gripping sense of tightly contained menace and looming doom. He brings those skills to Rebel Ridge, in which a perfectly unjust situation gets only more complicated the more those in power feel emboldened to do their dirty work in broad daylight, try to stamp it out instead of doing the right thing. It leaves a man without power no choice but to grab on for dear life and hope for real justice to prevail. The inciting incident finds a good man (Aaron Pierre), a black veteran, stopped by small-town police (David Denman and Emory Cohen) on his way to bail his cousin out of jail. Seeing a fat stack of cash in his backpack, his life savings, the cops take it and scoff at his protestations of innocence. Evidence, they say. Suspected criminal proceeds. Civil forfeiture. He can fill out a form to dispute the confiscation and hope for the best. Highway robbery. The more he tries to get his money back, the more the cops harass him, intimidate him, insinuate he’d be arrested or worse if he even thinks about pursuing this further.

The movie is smart about the ways in which a police force can get high on their immunity and act with impunity, even as their posturing bravado and barking orders barely cover their hair-trigger tempers and easily bruised egos. (Chief Don Johnson is perfectly enraging as a man used to getting his way through mere intimation of power.) And it’s smart, too, about the logic of a crooked cop’s traffic stop escalation, and the ways in which an officer can feel totally safe to pull a gun out and shoot an unarmed man without fear of retribution. This simmering in the background of the film’s slow-growing crescendo gives an edge of danger—even as potentially sympathetic “good cops”—let alone a local courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), who has her own dangers—are slow to do the right thing out of reasonable fear of their own colleagues. What gives the movie a satisfying kick beyond the social justice angle is its commitment to grubby genre simplicity—a good match of intentions. These cops messed with the wrong guy. Like a low-key, slightly more realistic Walking Tall or First Blood or Jack Reacher, this veteran is more than ready to stand up for himself. The movie’s look and mood is as clean and clear and simple as its setup, holding close on Pierre’s intense eyes and powerful stance, negotiating the frame to maximize the physicality of the blocking. It holds steady in stillness until—wham!—firearms are aimed and fists are clenched. It exercises such admirable restraint—even in its well-earned action finale never turning into a mindless blood-lust—that each punch or gunshot lands with considerable force.

Punk'd: GREEN ROOM

Green Room is little more than an exercise in unrelenting tension. It locks its sympathetic protagonists in a small space, trapping them with danger all around. The situation doesn’t look good, and only gets worse as it springs a steadily more inevitable series of violent incidents upon them. There’s a grim competence to its interest in the process of their plight. This is writer-director Jeremy Saulnier playing to his strengths. His last movie, the small-budget success Blue Ruin, was a clammy revenge thriller that was at its best when methodically locked in on its squirming characters as they fumbled toward hard-fought empty catharsis. Here Saulnier brings only that sense of mounting dread, put to use for a movie more interested in conventional genre thrills, in building a contraption by which to torture its characters for our benefit. You could almost read it as a restrained sideways slasher picture, more muted and dry than that subgenre’s usual fare, but just as single-minded in its kills.

At its center is an obscure, struggling young punk band, members played by familiar faces Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat with young character actors Joe Cole and Callum Turner. Likable enough, they seem like cuddly rockers, the sort drawn to hard rock as a way of posturing over their vulnerabilities. In it for the love of music, they’ve barely enough in their coffers for a tank of gas. The group is so desperate for a gig they decide to head out to a backwoods skinhead bar where, through the cousin of an acquaintance, they’ve been promised $350 for a quick afternoon set. “Just don’t talk politics,” their helpful contact (David W. Thompson) advises. It goes off without a hitch until they happen to witness a murder, and then get locked in the green room – with the dead body, a hulking gun-toting guard (Eric Edelstein), and a frightened punk fan (Imogen Poots) – while the neo-Nazis gather on the other side of the door, wanting to get these interlopers out of the picture. Will they get framed? Tortured? Murdered? Whatever happens, it won’t be good, that’s for sure.

Saulnier gives the film a precision and clarity, capably mapping out the tight quarters and allowing us to understand the characters’ reactions. We process the threat as they do, while cutting between their claustrophobic fear and the looming threats assembling outside. The story is so quickly sketched there’s little room to understand the players as people or figure out their motivations beyond survival. What little background information there is gets doled out in convenient downtime lulls. The leads are so inherently appealing, however, that Saulnier merely has to ensnare them in his meticulous frames and crisp cuts to get the sympathy going. It helps that he has some real powerhouses for villains, making his Blue Ruin star Macon Blair into a soft-spoken henchman and no less than Patrick Stewart the main antagonist. He carries with him the aura of authority, lending much needed weight that's not exactly on the page to a mild-mannered Nazi who calmly assess the need to coax the band out to be killed, or, failing that, storm the green room and cut them up there.

So it’s a siege movie, like Assault on Precinct 13 or Die Hard, but played at a quieter and smaller scale. The sides are obvious, the goals are clear, and the obstacles are agonizingly stubborn. Saulnier provides good specificity to the locale, a dim and ugly lived-in bar with dangerous hate group fanatics growling and prowling. But the movie isn’t about a clash of ideology. That they’re neo-Nazis is only to provide shorthand for their villainy. (And for Shawkat to snark backstage that if Yelchin doesn’t do what she says, she’ll “tell them you’re Jewish.”) It’s not about ideas. It’s not even about music, punk rock only used for energy, background noise, and set dressing. It’s about strategy, watching as characters play out a literal and deadly locked-room game, making use of their wits to maneuver the few tools available to them and finagle a way to survive.

Crescendos of taut tension escalate to outbursts of truly disgusting displays of violence, detailed in the seeping wounds, spurting blood, dangling flesh, and gaping gashes. This is a slick, skuzzy, and carefully composed little thriller, Sean Porter’s cinematography so handsome and Julia Bloch’s editing so meticulous that Saulnier builds to Green Room’s most shocking moments with horrifying deadpan. It’s been a while since I heard an entire audience wince as one in response to an unexpected gory moment. The film may not add up to much beyond a visceral kick of surprise and terror while likable people get menaced, maimed, and murdered – and the tremble of relief as some find safety, even if it’s only temporary – but the experience is admirably tense. This is the sort of smartly constructed and capably executed thriller that may not have a lot on its mind, but at least it’s gripping on its own terms.

Blood on the Brain: BLUE RUIN

If you want another movie that says revenge is a messy, unsatisfying prospect for the one taking revenge, but a thrill for the audience watching, here’s Blue Ruin. It tells one of those stories that gives a protagonist a good reason to get all wound up with thoughts of enacting bloody vengeance upon the people who done him wrong and then sees where he takes that impulse. Usually, this means getting at least an instant of a kick out of the gory settling of scores. Writer-director-cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier’s movie is too spare and clammy for that. Here revenge is actually messy, is hard to pull off, and resolutely not glamorized. It’s just not worth it for the characters and almost not worth it to watch.

Our protagonist is Dwight (Macon Blair), sweaty and nervous, bumbling his way towards killing the man responsible for the deaths of his parents. We watch Dwight for a long time before we realize what’s happening, and even when we do Saulnier takes great pains to show us the residual anxiety that spreads out amongst his family, as his sister (Amy Hargreaves) worries and would really rather he not go through with it. His target has just gotten out of prison, news grave enough to snap him out of his homeless-beach-bum lifestyle. He heads off in pursuit, eventually cornering the man and causing great harm, an action that brings his target’s family into the equation as well. Two wrongs don’t make a right, even and especially when it all seems to lead towards a gunfight.

Saulnier unspools his plot through long stretches of patient (sometimes aimless) silence and fumbling dialogue. The silences are cold and observant, regarding the proceedings from a polished remove with cinematography that gives grasping desperation and cheap settings an oddly formal handsome quality. The dialogue is sometimes darkly funny, like when our uneasy protagonist ends up getting into an argument with a man who he has locked in the trunk of a car, the queasy laughs coming into the picture sideways as he slowly loses the upper hand before a sudden bloody punctuation stops the exchange dead. By the time the deliberate plot finds reason for some key plot twists to be revealed, we’ve thoroughly exhausted any reason to want to see further violence, but Dwight grimly soldiers on.

It all leads up to a final confrontation sick with dread and broken with violence. It’s inevitable and predictable. But it is also some mild sort of satisfying to see a revenge-is-messy movie actually commit to the mess. Usually in stories of this type we’re supposed to get a sick kick out of the bloodshed while the storyteller summons up just enough energy for a wagging finger of shame over the sad and sorry state of human affairs. There’s some of that here – you don’t cast Eve Plumb, Jan Brady herself, in a key climactic role and expect to walk away without some extratextual pulpy fun – but it’s as horrible, scary, and sad as it is a much needed jolt of energy to a movie that’s threatening to dwindle away into nothing for most of its runtime.