Review

Culture

Film & TV

Justice

Race

18 September 2024

6 min read

Rebel Ridge switches the code on corrupt coppers and body counts

An action movie tackling the all-time low trust in public bodies.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two men stand off against each other, one holds a holstered gun.

Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre.

Netflix.

I wasn’t expecting to emotionally connect with this straight-to-Netflix action movie but Rebel Ridge is not a normal action film. It may be sitting at the number one position on the Netflix film charts, with its echoes of a classic Jack-Reacher-style thriller, but where it surprises and stands apart is in its challenging and nuanced handling of race, violence and corruption.

Race

Like Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher, Terry Richmond played by Aaron Pierre is a former US military officer. He is a private person, self-confident, respectful, comfortable with his own company and willing to go the extra mile to help a cousin who has got himself in a mess. Despite his lowly job in a restaurant, Terry happens to have financial means as well as expert survival and hand-to-hand combat skills. He is also Black.

The opening sequence shows Terry cycling into a small town when he is accosted by two local – white - police officers. Suddenly the dynamic changes. The determined, self-confident, resourceful man becomes the downtrodden object of a series of abuses and injustices. Terry tries everything to deescalate the problem, without success. Nevertheless, he remains polite, referring always to the officers who deal with him as “Sir”, and finding things to thank them for.

I found myself relating to this, remembering times that I have had to deal with abusive power and hoping that if I remain calm, polite and respectful, I could win the other side over. Some have called this “respectability politics” – the pressure on marginalized groups, particularly Black people, to behave in a manner that aligns with dominant cultural norms - including being overly-polite or restrained - especially in the face of abusive power or injustice. Another term for this is "code-switching," where minority groups feel the need to adjust behaviour, language, or appearance to fit into a different cultural context, often in response to systemic power imbalances.

Terry tries everything to get out of his situation with minimum disruption. But things deteriorate so far so quickly that Terry realises that nothing he can say or do will allow him to extricate himself. Cornered in this way, he is forced to pursue justice by other means.

It is hard not to see this film without remembering the death of George Floyd. That terrible incident in May 2020 highlighted racial disparities in policing in the US: 13 per cent of the American population is Black, yet they account for about 25-28 per cent of police killings each year. According to the Mapping Police Violence project, Black people are up to three times more likely to be killed by police than white people - between 2013 and 2022, about 7,000 Black Americans were killed by police.

The UK’s police services have had to admit to similar disparities. Black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched compared to white people in England and Wales. In London, where stop-and-search powers are more frequently used, Black individuals make up around a third of all stop and searches, despite representing about 13 per cent of the city's population. From arresting, handcuffing, the use of taser, remanding in custody and more, data shows that racial disparities are evident across the service. These disparities undermine trust in the police service, which in turn can inhibit the cooperation and information sharing needed to reduce crime and protect citizens.

The racial tensions that permeate the movie give viewers a glimpse into what it is like to be mistrustful of those who are supposed to help and serve us. As such it is a masterpiece in raising awareness of racism wherever it is experienced, and the fear and injustice that go with it.

Violence

Terry is huge, athletic and highly skilled. Like most movies of this genre, I was expecting the protagonist to be pushed to breaking point, thereby unleashing a wave of violence so severe and overwhelming that he becomes an unstoppable killing machine.

In Taken, Bryan Mills, played by Liam Neeson, kills almost 100 people, mainly of Albanian nationality, by gunfire, strangulation and electrocution, on his quest to protect his family. In the more recent John Wick series of films, Wick, played by Keanu Reeves, a retired assassin, kills over 400 people in a wave of violence initiated by the theft of a car and the killing of a puppy.

But Rebel Ridge is different. A key thread in the movie is the use of Escalation of Force–Non-Lethal Effects (EoF-NLE), meaning the use of verbal warnings, warning shots, non-lethal explosives and physical restraint tools like tasers or pepper spray that are supposed to minimise the risk of injury and death. In the film, the corrupt police officers have not only illegally raised money to buy this equipment they have also profited from renting out their EoF-NLE to third parties.

Terry shows himself to be a different kind of hero, with a stronger moral compass than the police service as he uses their own EoF-NLE against them. On one occasion we watch as he loads and racks his gun, only to use it in self-defence. He is an avenging angel unleashed who refuses to kill people. There are plenty of showdowns, but the final total body count is one.

Corruption

Many action movies, Taken and John Wick included, contain little social commentary. Rebel Ridge, on the other hand, is prepared to tackle some significant social issues. The corruption around EoF-NLE and militarisation of local police forces is one example. The other questionable practice that gets much discussion is “civil asset forfeiture” - an anti-drug regulation that allows a police officer to seize cash and other valuables with no due process. Both issues as portrayed in this film highlight the wider question of accountability of policing, as well as the potential for corruption that comes with its absence.

Indeed, it's not just about ‘bent coppers’ – the whole justice system is shown to be at risk in this film. The local judge is implicated in the corruption, and the state prison, as expected, fails to protect. The impact is pervasive. We see a conflicted black female police officer, a court worker struggling to get court support, and many others who stand idly by because they don’t seem to know what is right or good anymore.

At a time when trust in public bodies is at an all-time low – this film, despite its non-violent and subversive tropes, presents to us a heroic rebel with a higher moral compass who goes against the flow and pushes back against the system to try and fix things. It may not restore faith in our society’s institutions – but perhaps it does restore faith in something else.

Although the director, Jeremy Saulnier, claims Rebel Ridge was not based on a true story, I cannot help thinking of a true story that might have inspired it. I am reminded of Jesus Christ, the most famous rebel in history, who was killed in a showdown on a ridge outside Jerusalem for speaking out – lashing out even - against the corruption in the religious institutions of his time, for taking an anti-racist stance, and for living in a way that went against the flow. It reminds me of the lengths he went to get those he loved freed from the mess they had gotten themselves into, and the price he paid to try and save them from certain death. Like Rebel Ridge, the ending to that story remains open: who will take up the call and will true justice ever be served?

Column

Culture

Migration

Politics

20 November 2025

4 min read

From MI6 to migration: the tangled legacy of empire

Britain’s security dilemmas, from LinkedIn spies to post-colonial legacies, reveal a deeper global story

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Home Office.

There’s a food chain in the British intelligence services and the government offices they serve. The Foreign Office is advised by MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or more usually simply “Six”, which, though it would deny it in favour of claims of collaboration, looks down on the national security service, MI5, which serves the Home Office.

An old acquaintance from Six used casually to call the parochial Home Office the LEO, short for Little England Office. There’s less of that now, to be sure, as they struggle to accommodate their political masters. Foreheads were rubbed wearily at MI6’s HQ by Vauxhall Bridge when Yvette Cooper, fresh from proscribing Palestine Action at the Home Office as a terrorist organisation alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, was made up to foreign secretary at the last re-shuffle.

Meanwhile, over the river, MI5 faces the challenge of a new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who may believe that the prospect of limiting leave to remain to a maximum of 20 years and confiscating their jewellery might dissuade those with ill intent against the British state from embarking on a small boat.

Taken together, these challenges make it not a good time to be an intelligence officer, or even an intelligent one. It gets worse on the canvas of large superpowers. The problems with an erratic clown of American jurisdiction are well recorded. But China is something else.

They’d be chuckling merrily at MI6, if it wasn’t so serious, at the headlines this week, suggesting that China’s principal infiltration of the British state is through agents posing as headhunters on LinkedIn. The immeasurably greater threat from Chinese intelligence has come from the global march that China has stolen in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the network of Chinese-sourced sensors, software and chips embedded and monitored in technologies that connect and exchange data globally.

This isn’t tin-foil hat conspiracy territory; it’s real and has been called out for years. It’s significantly why the case against two alleged British spies for China was recently withdrawn. Britain has to keep China sweet for fear of what it knows of and could do with British data. That’s a massive US problem too.

To that end, trade and co-operation are the way to keep China onside, not confrontation. It’s an example that the Foreign Office might set for the Home Office. And, indeed, the two might work more closely together (just a suggestion).

The Home Office has long acknowledged that there are “Push and Pull” factors to our immigration crisis. It almost exclusively concentrates on the Pull, by trying to make the UK a less attractive destination for migrants through limits of right to remain and by nicking their jewellery. The Push factors are war, oppression and economic deprivation and these are very much more the territory of the Foreign Office.

A big problem arises when the Home Office tries to do the Foreign Office’s job, as when Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa bans for the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Namibia. Good luck with that – it betrays a neo-colonial instinct and there, perhaps, is the rub.

We pay a post-colonial price in both illegal and legal immigration. A predominantly Christian Europe and New World endeavoured to make disciples of every nation and now many of them are coming home. Christian culture as a former weapon of oppression is perhaps overstated, but there’s some truth in it. An even more stark truth is that we have to address the Push elements of migration if we are to find common ground on which we can make progress.

Our colonial oversight left Afghanistan a modern and post-modern historical mess. Syria is almost untouchable in its post-Assad dynastic horrors. The Indian subcontinent is still a wreckage that we abandoned only some 80 years ago.

Trying to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan or the former al-Qaeda breakaway al-Sharaa interim regime in Syria may not be so much a triumph of hope over experience as of naivety over history. But our current position with China may point a way forward. Tariff-free trade and economic co-development is a surer way to address migration crises than making arrivals unwelcome.

It’s admittedly more complicated than China. A US/UK post-colonial future will need to align neo-Christian western cultures with an enlightened Islam that concentrates on the Quranic instructions of co-existence, respect, fairness and the explicit injunction that there can be “no compulsion in religion”. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

That’s the call of the 21st century and it is, quite clearly, a global rather than nationalistic one. The US will need to recover its position in the world. And, in the UK, foreheads will need to be raised from being banged on desks to solve foreign crises before they wash up on our shores.