Joe Carnahan set a high bar for himself with the hyperviolent 2002 crime drama Narc, and The Rip is the first film he’s made in 20 years that might be able to touch it. His debut feature, the belligerently titled Blood, Guts, Bullets And Octane, aligns more with the rest of his filmography: The A-Team, Smoking Aces, Stretch; his exemplary The Grey stands apart. The Rip is nowhere near as gripping or viscerally upsetting as Narc, but it functions comfortably enough as a dependable mid-tier action movie, with its grizzled performances, gunplay, and plethora of twists to keep Dad from dozing in his recliner. Carnahan’s ferocious auteur days may be well behind him, but with his latest angry-cops genre effort, he’s finally showing signs of a second wind.
The real draw, though, is the reunion of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who sport hardass beards and bicker like angry brothers as the situation around them spirals into hell. The Rip is hardly an Affleck/Damon bro-down; amid the film’s thrumming plot of shifty-eyed police, Colombian drug cartels, and $20 million at its center, there’s little space in its two hours for their brand of joshing. Still, whenever Affleck and Damon mean-mug and hurl invective at each other—which is often, thanks to Carnahan’s quadruple-twist convolutions—the film becomes just as gripping as it believes it is. The Rip‘s minor successes are easily explained: The audience has a stake in the decades-long friendship between its stars, so there is a charge whenever they share the screen.
The Rip opens with the brutal execution of Captain Velez (Lina Esco), of the Miami Police’s Tactical Narcotics Team (their edgy shorthand is “TNT”). They specialize in “rips,” drug enforcement jargon for relieving dealers of their stock and/or cash. Velez’s murder attracts all kinds of heat for TNT’s surviving lieutenant, Dumars (Damon): The FBI, led by a woefully underutilized Scott Adkins, suspects Velez was dirty. They sense something’s rotten inside her unit. No doubt TNT is an anxious crew: there’s hotheaded Byrne (Affleck), defensive Ro (Steven Yeun), eager Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), and distracted Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno)—even less invested is their money-sniffin’ dog, Wilbur. From a distance, the group looks tight, but Carnahan pulls in closer to expose the fissures long in place.
The FBI has a disturbing theory: Maybe Velez’s killer was a cop. Certainly, someone in the unit knows why she died. Co-devised by TV writer Michael McGrale, the story puts suspicion front-and-center to make us doubt Dumars’ unit, and Dumars himself, from the start. It’s effective intrigue; the permutations of betrayal within TNT, we quickly learn, are many. The volatility is embodied in Byrne, who puffs out his chest at federal attention—he’s trying to hide his secret relationship with Velez, the first of many obfuscations Carnahan chisels into the film. Byrne’s bluster has the opposite effect, leaving TNT vulnerable to outsider scrutiny just as they execute their latest raid, on a house at the end of an abandoned cul-de-sac in Hialeah, a Miami suburb with a welcome sign shot into Swiss cheese. There, the complications multiply: The local cops are cagier than usual, and TNT clocks the neighborhood as cartel-bought turf. Exacerbating the unease is the house’s owner, Desi (Sasha Calle), who knows more about the situation than she’s letting on. Later, when the walls come down and barrels carrying $1.4 million each start falling out, she has some advice for her unwelcome guests: Take the money and run, or else.
This pressure cooker is classic Carnahan, who previously staged variations of it in Copshop (essentially Assault On Precinct 13 sapped of John Carpenter‘s effective zombie-like imagery) and in Narc‘s finale, which locked its agitated cast in a warehouse to hash out their differences. Carnahan knows how to let distrust fester: Dumars, we learn, got his promotion over Byrne and hasn’t been right since his son died; Ro keeps sneaking off to text secret updates on the unit’s status; Desi overhears a conversation she shouldn’t have. Unsurprisingly, given the tension (which boils over during a finale that makes the fatal error of splitting up the co-leads), The Rip’s strongest elements are those that adhere to the grammar of the “shady types stumble onto hidden treasure” movie. Genre intuition says that the money will start working on these people, duty be damned. Right on cue, once hands are put on it, dreams and needs enter the conversation. Then, someone finally says it: “It’d be so much easier if we just stole this money.” As predictable as these beats are, they’re far more compelling than the elusive cop-and-cartel shadows lurking in the periphery.
Despite the story bloat, Carnahan spins a tight web for the first two-thirds of his movie. There’s a tense staredown with those Hialeah cops, who don’t like TNT pulling rips in their backyard. Through the fog, a street lamp begins flickering in Morse code: “P-I-G-S.” A showdown mounts, and everyone vests up, even the dog. Cinematographer Juan Miguel Azpiroz (Copshop, Boss Level) shoots most of it at arm’s length, which limits the up-close-and-personal immediacy that made Narc so impactful and gnarly. (A climactic fistfight is shot from so far away that the TVs streaming this on Netflix may as well be across the street.) Azpiroz’s distance does have some thematic effect; as the fog rolls in, the moral murk thickens, but it only gives Carnahan so much cover to pull off his biggest twist of the night.
That’s the problem with The Rip: its meat-and-potatoes approach has little artistry to give its violence distinction, and so it all feels predictable. After Narc, Carnahan was subsumed by the Hollywood machine and made sillier ensemble action films. He found his inner stoic again with The Grey, only to return once again to generic action junk. Something has been lost along this journey. As an action director, he’s a stylist—his films are alpha posturing, lots of guns, even more fuckin’ swears—but we’ve seen him exhibit interest in violence’s erosion of the soul in the past. What makes The Rip his best film in years is that it signals a renewed interest in that decay. In the better moments of his latest shoot-’em-up, Carnahan actually finds the flawed people forced to pull the trigger.
Director: Joe Carnahan
Writer: Joe Carnahan
Starring: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Sasha Calle, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, Kyle Chandler, Néstor Carbonell, Lina Esco
Release Date: January 16, 2026 (Netflix)
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