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?

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Community

Culture

Education

27 October 2025

5 min read

Artificial Intelligence needs these school lessons to avoid a Frankenstein fail

To learn and to learn to care are inseparable

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A cyborg like figure opens the door to a classroom.

AI in the classroom.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Recent worries expressed by Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, over the welfare of his chatbot bounced around my brain as I dropped my girls off for their first days at a new primary school last month. Maybe I felt an unconscious parallel. Maybe setting my daughters adrift in the swirling energy of a schoolyard containing ten times as many pupils as their previous one gave me a twinge of sympathy for a mogul launching his billion-dollar creation into the id-infused wilds of the internet. But perhaps it was more the feeling of disjuncture, the intuition that whatever information this bot would glean from trawling the web,it was fundamentally different from what my daughters would receive from that school, an education.

We often struggle to remember what it is to be educated, mistaking what can be assessed in a written or oral exam for knowledge. However, as Hannah Arendt observed over a half century ago, education is not primarily about accumulating a grab bag of information and skills, but rather about being nurtured into a love for the world, to have one’s desire to learn about, appreciate, and care for that world cultivated by people whom one respects and admires. As I was reminded, watching the hundreds of pupils and parents waiting for the morning bell, that sort of education only happens in places, be it at school or in the home, where children themselves feel loved and valued.

Our attachments are inextricably linked to learning. That’s why most of us can rattle off a list of our favourite teachers and describe moments when a subject took life as we suddenly saw it through their eyes. It’s why we can call to mind the gratitude we felt when a tutor coached us through a maths problem, lab project, or piano piece which we thought we would never master. Rather than being the pouring of facts into the empty bucket of our minds, our educations are each a unique story of connection, care, failure, and growth.

I cannot add 8+5 without recalling my first-grade teacher, the impossibly ancient Mrs Coleman, gazing benevolently over her half-moon glasses, correcting me that it was 13, not 12. When I stride across the stage of my village pantomime this December, I know memories of a pint-sized me hamming it up in my third-grade teacher’s self-penned play will flit in and out of mind. I cannot write an essay without the voice of Professor Coburn, my exacting university metaphysics instructor, asking me if I am really saying what is truthful, or am resorting to fuzzy language to paper over my lack of understanding. I have been shaped by my teachers. I find myself repaying the debts accrued to them in the way I care for students now. To learn and to learn to care are inseparable.

But what if they weren’t? AI seems to open the vista where intelligences can simply appear, trained not by humans, but by recursive algorithms, churning through billions of calculations on rows of servers located in isolated data centres. Yes, those calculations are mostly still done on human produced data, though the insatiable need for more has eaten through most everything freely available on the web and in whatever pirated databases of books and media these companies have been able to locate, but learning from human products is not the same as learning from human beings. The situation seems wholly original, wholly unimaginable.

Except it was imagined in a book written over two hundred years ago which, as Guillermo del Toro’s recent attempt to capture that vision reminds us, remains incredibly relevant today. Filmmakers, and from trailers I suspect Del Toro is no different here, tend to treat the story of Frankenstein as one of glamorous transgression: Dr Frankenstein as Faust, heroically testing the limits of human knowledge and human decency. But Mary Shelley’s protagonist is an altogether more pathetic character, one who creates in an extended bout of obsessive experimentation and then spends the rest of the book running from any obligation to care for the creature he has made.

It is the creature who is the true hero of the novel and he is a tragic one precisely because his intelligence, skills, and abilities are acquired outside the realm of human connection. When happenstance allows him to furtively observe lessons given within a loving, but impoverished family, he imagines himself into that circle of growing love and knowledge. It is when he is disabused of this notion, when the family discovers him and is disgusted, when he learns that he is doomed to know, but not be known, that he turns into a monster bent on revenge. As the Milton-quoting monster reminds Frankenstein, even Adam, though born fully grown, was nurtured by his maker. Since even this was denied creature, what choice does he have but to take the role of Satan and tear down the world that birthed him?

Are our modern maestros of AI Dr Frankensteins? Not yet. For all the talk of sentient-like responses by LLMs, avoiding talking about distressing topics for example, the best explanation of such behaviour is that they simply are mimicking their training sets which are full of humans expressing discomfort about those same topics. However, if these companies are really as serious about developing a fully sentient AGI, about achieving the so-called singularity, as much of the buzz around them suggests, then the chief difference between them and Frankenstein is one of ability rather than ambition. If eventually they are able to realise their goals and intelligences emerge, full of information, but unnurtured and unloved, how will they behave? Is there any reason to think that they will be more Adam than Satan when we are their creators?

At the end of Shelley’s novel, an unreconstructed Frankenstein tells his tale to a polar explorer in a ship just coming free from the pack ice. The explorer is facing the choice of plunging onward in the pursuit of knowledge, glory, and, possibly, death, or heeding the call of human connections, his sister’s love, his crew’s desire to see their families. Frankenstein urges him on, appeals to all his ambitions, hoping to drown out the call of home. He fails. The ship turns homeward. Knowledge shorn of attachment, ambition that ignores obligation, these, Shelley tells us, are not worth pursuing. Will we listen to her warning?

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