The Rip (2026) Review

For a while it looks like this film is going in a more interesting direction… but it never gets there.

Jan 20, 2026

The Rip (2026)

Director: Joe Carnahan

Screenwriters: Joe Carnahan, Michael McGrale

Starting: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kyle Chandler, Sasha Calle, Scott Adkins

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

It’s been a while since writer-director Joe Carnahann has been on his A-game (and that’s not a cheeky reference to his misguided A-Team movie reboot). Known for his tricky, morally murky debut cop thriller Narc, wild ensemble action-comedy Smokin’ Aces, and Liam Neeson vs wolves thriller The Grey, Carnahan returns to the big time with the latest onscreen reunion between best buddies Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, in the unfortunately titled The Rip.

Following the murder of their leader, an anonymous tip leads to a raid on a cartel drop site in a deserted housing project, which goes south when the specialist Tactical Narcotics Team finds not the thousands they were expecting but twenty million in cash. Having been set up by parties unknown, suspicion soon falls to each other as they weigh up how to turn the situation around and get out alive.

Carnahan has assembled quite a cast here. Damon and Affleck, both impressively bearded, play the morally flexible Lt. Dane Dumars (introduced justifying his maverick actions to his superior) and the volatile Det. JD Byrne (introduced throwing his FBI agent brother around a conference room), while their unit are made up of Steven Yeun (Mickey 17), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another) and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Ballerina). Sasha Calle (The Flash) and Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) round out the ensemble as a victim of both the cops’ and the cartels’ brutality and JD’s DEA team backup.

Mobile phones have become extensions of most people’s arms in the time since Carnahan’s last dirty cop movie, so it’s no surprise how prominent a plot device they are here, admittedly providing somewhat of an undramatic shortcut in some cases. Dumars may confiscate his team’s devices to avoid escalating their predicament, but word still gets around a lot quicker than it would in a film made 20 years ago.

I’m not sure if there’s a less clunky way of making sure the audience is keeping up with the technical jargon and the acronyms than characters stopping to explain anything tricky to others out loud, but it does break momentum in a scene. There’s a bit too much telling over showing in general in this movie, enough to wish filmmakers and/or the studios funding their projects had more faith in an audience’s attention span.

It’s a tense picture that slowly but surely ratchets everything up. A particularly creepy moment sees every exterior light in what is essentially a ghost town turn on at the same time before starting to blink in sequence, seemingly as a final warning to the cops to get out of dodge. Then there are some other nice touches, like the bulk of the story advancing in real-time, letting the characters really live with their anxieties and their questionable decisions moment-to-moment; particularly effective when a threatening phone call delivering a countdown to an all-out war turns out to be accurate to the minute.

It’s interesting that Damon and Affleck’s roles could have have easily been flipped given the former’s usual straight-arrow hero persona and the latter’s knotty, tortured turns. Here it’s Damon in the grey and Affleck trying to act as his conscience, and some of the most compelling scenes here seem to be toying with, and subverting our expectations about the kinds of characters these frequent co-stars play.

Damon’s character has two prominent acronym tattoos on each hand (which of course have to be explained out loud and linked to a tragic backstory) and when it’s revealed that “A.W.T.G.G” means “are we the good guys?” and “W.A.A.W.B” is “we are and always will be” some will find the whole thing a little tricky to swallow. Cop movies are a difficult sell for many these days, and even if they are represented by complicated, conflicted and far from all-out heroic characters like they are here, if we’re still coming down the side of their actions often being brutal but ultimately necessary then we’ve got a problem. The reality of headlines, bodycam footage and the testimonies of victims just don’t match with this kind of story, so it’s no surprise it’s more successful if you treat it as a gritty neo-Western and you ignore its misguided commentary on contemporary law enforcement.

For a while it looks like this film is going in a more interesting direction… then it just doesn’t. We get the standard action-heavy finale and all the twists and double-crosses can be seen a mile off. The action is all pretty slickly executed, the performances are decent, even if the characters on the page are well-worn. The Rip is good enough, but even with Damon and Affleck’s star power and Carnahan’s technical skill, this one seems destined for a single watch only during your latest scroll through Netflix.

Second Cut

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?