To paraphrase a recent story, Matt Damon said that, outside of a small collaboration in “The Last Duel” (a film where they only share a handful of scenes), he and his longtime bff Ben Affleck hadn’t really co-starred in anything together since 1999’s “Dogma.” Then the pandemic hit, perspective shifted, and the two realized they should be less precious and just make something—work, together. That mentality lifted “Air,” the launch of their company Artists Equity, and now their latest collaboration, “The Rip.”
Directed by Joe Carnahan, an action-minded journeyman with a knack for brash momentum, “The Rip”—Miami cop slang for a big takedown—plays like a going-to-work movie in the best and bluntest sense. It’s muscular, no-fuss-no-muss genre filmmaking: a cop-corruption thriller that snaps into place with procedural efficiency, then starts tightening the screws with paranoia and pressure-cooker distrust.
READ MORE: The 150 Most Anticipated Movies Of 2026
The vocational premise is deceptively clean. “From the outside looking in, it looks simple,” Damon’s Lieutenant Dane Dumars says in a steely bit of voiceover: cops seize cash, count it, and turn it in. But with any operation that involves thousands—sometimes millions—temptation turns simple into corrosive.
“The Rip” begins in tragedy. Miami cop Jackie Velez (Lina Esco), former head of the Miami-Dade Tactical Narcotics Team, is executed during a covert operation gone sideways. In the wake of her death, her TNT squad—Dumars, Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Affleck), Detective Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Detective Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and Detective Lolo Salazar (Sandino Moreno)—is grieving and furious, and they don’t even have time to do either properly before Internal Affairs and the Feds start raking them over the coals.
One of those federal presences cuts close: Byrne’s younger brother (Scott Adkins) is among the agents circling the team, adding an extra layer of stink-eye to the inquisition. Was Velez’s death an inside job? Did TNT set her up—or fail her? Carnahan smartly makes the scrutiny feel less like a standard plot checkpoint and more like a contaminant: once doubt enters the room, it doesn’t leave. There’s also a personal fault line waiting to split open. Dumars—still raw from losing his son to cancer—has been promoted in the aftermath, leapfrogging Byrne and leaving a faint haze of resentment hanging over two lifelong colleagues who know each other too well to say it out loud.
Some chest-puffing and fisticuffs later, the team gets its next assignment off an anonymous tip: a derelict stash house with a modest score. They arrive expecting a neat little seizure, something in the $150K range. Instead, they find a complication with a pulse: a young woman, Desi (Sasha Calle), watching her grandmother’s house. And they find the real payload—millions in cash, hidden inside the walls.
It’s the kind of discovery that doesn’t just change the math; it changes the moral equation and the air. The number is astronomical—around $20 million—and it instantly raises the temperature in the room, the stress rising like a tide that suddenly comes ashore. A score that big doesn’t just tempt; it announces itself. It forces these cops to look over their shoulders, question their instincts, question each other, and interrogate the comforting story they tell themselves about being the “good guys.” Carnahan understands that the money is a character: silent, heavy, and radioactive. And once outsiders sniff it out—cartel operators, rival interests, sussy beat cops, anyone with a reason to believe the TNT team is suddenly sitting on a fortune—trust becomes a currency nobody can afford.
There are additional moving parts complicating the moral calculation: Kyle Chandler as DEA Agent Mateo “Matty” Nix, an ally of Byrne’s with his own stake in the fallout; cartel guys closing in; and at least one cop playing a longer, riskier game that turns the plot into a series of tightening knots. To say more is to spoil the film’s best pleasures, and Carnahan’s script (he’s also the writer) occasionally flirts with contrivance as it heaps reversals on top of reversals like cocky stacks. But even when the mechanics start to show, the engine keeps roaring.
Affleck and Damon are sturdy, lived-in presences as senior cops who’ve spent years reading each other’s silences. The film doesn’t need much expository handholding to sell their history; a glance, a half-sentence, a withheld reaction—there are decades there. That intimacy is the movie’s emotional center: friendship as the movie’s infrastructure, trust as its muscle memory, and the creeping dread of realizing that even the closest bond can buckle when the stakes spike off the chart. The Mattfleck shorthand is the movie’s best tension and shows how little these men have to say to communicate everything—and how dangerous it becomes when that communication starts to fracture.
Carnahan may be the real MVP here. “The Rip” isn’t a masterpiece, and it can be blunt and workmanlike by design, but it’s brawny, confident, and it moves. You can feel the lineage—“Serpico,” “Prince of the City,” whiffs of Mann’s procedural cool—and Sidney Lumet’s moral grime underneath it all, where the job isn’t just dangerous, it’s compromising.
His smartest move is making the procedure the suspense. The lockstep efficiency—rolling in, clearing rooms, counting stacks, logging evidence—plays like its own kind of action, until the size of the score turns competence into a liability and every clean step starts to feel like a setup.
By the time the film cashes in on its premise, it lands on a nasty, satisfying truth: betrayal doesn’t need fireworks. And that’s where Affleck and Damon payoff: two guys who’ve known each other forever, suddenly realizing familiarity isn’t the same thing as certainty. By the end, the title stops sounding like slang. It’s a warning: the big score draws predators in from outside and tears apart the bonds that hold these crews together. [B]
“The Rip” is now streaming on Netflix.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
