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

Awe and wonder

Culture

Sport

Wildness

10 July 2025

6 min read

Surfing with Dostoevsky: what waves taught me about the journey

The water draws things out of us that we can’t see on our own

Rick Hansen

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” For many, the true purpose of life is not merely a philosophical concept, but a fundamental inquiry. It's about uncovering something beyond our individual selves, an answer to the inherent question about the very meaning of our existence.

The place where I find myself pondering this mystery is on my surfboard. Whether anticipating a wave or carving along its emerging curl, the ocean consistently beckons me to meditate on a quest for a re-enchantment of our profound spiritual mystery.

I have loved surfing since I was young. I remember the first wave I really surfed in Southern California. I was 14 and an insecure high school kid who struggled with a severe stutter. It was so bad that I viewed everything in my life through the lens of my stutter. Consequently, I always wanted to hide in the shadows and never be seen, because any time I opened my mouth to speak it was a mess. But something happened for me that day that forever changed how I saw myself. On that wave, I saw my potential, my person, not just my stutter.

That morning the water was alive with a crazy energy churning just below the belly of my board. The waves were rolling in as beautiful lines etched against the morning sky. They stacked up on the outside reef and I picked my ride. I put my hands deep in the cold, blue waters and my heart began to race as I pulled and paddled toward the unknown. The wave that I chose rose to a perfect liquid wall. It was sheer beauty.

At that moment, it was just me and that wave. I realized I didn’t have to talk to anyone or worry about what others thought of me. Instead, I felt alive and free to be me. In this freedom, I could feel the exhilaration of pulling and paddling toward the horizon full of fear and excitement. I was caught up in the rush of the unknown size, shape and personality of the wave and what I would do once I caught it.

In a split second, I pivoted 180 degrees, perfectly positioned my body on the board, put my hands deep into the rising pitch, pulled in, and snapped up to my stance all in a single movement.

As I dropped in, my insecurities, my doubts, my fears …. my stutter vanished like the mist spraying off the curling wave. In that instant, I felt a connection to something beyond me as I found my line and carved up and down the face of the wave. I was forever hooked like an artist sculpting beauty out of a block of stone. On that wave I saw myself in a new and different light of potential. I converged with the board, the moment, with what needed to be done, and looked for what could be done. I found something more, something beyond me. "The experience of art is a cleansing of the spirit, a return to deeper emotional and imaginative states,” as Pablo Picasso put it.

You might say it’s weird but surfers have a deep sense of trust in the experience of surfing; the wave draws things out of us that we couldn’t see on our own. It inspires us to push our limits until we see and realize our potential, until we see something more.

Surfer Easkey Britton is the first Irish woman to be nominated for the Global WSL Big Wave Awards. She is a scientist, academic and social activist, with a PhD in Environment and Society and she is always one to look in places others aren’t for the answers to difficult questions. She said,

“A wave is like a mirror to our soul. Whether we paddle out and into the horizon, take a drop down the face of a liquid wall, or dive deep under a mountain of water as it crashes overhead, the wave reflects our fears, our willingness, our vision, our potential.”

Are we willing to look at ourselves in the mirror? Or better yet are we willing to venture out into the wild and let something else bigger than us show us … us?

I am not saying that wave gave me something to live for, but it did show me I was something more than my insecurity, my shortcoming, my limited view of who I was and what I perceived I could be. It revealed something outside of and beyond me. It acted much like that mirror Easkey talked about, and it revealed that I hid behind a cover, a disguise, a fear. In a melodic almost musical repose, it crashed on the shores of my perception and gently but powerfully rattled my forming identity and revealed something more.

Dostevesky speaks not of a moment but of a journey to find something, to find that thing that moves your soul, that stirs your being into that sense where we ponder “something to live for.” Surfing did that for me.

For the surfer the reward is the journey of the never ending search for the next wave. It’s not about just one wave, just one drop. It’s the whole experience of the journey, wave after wave; it’s the sensation of the ride and the work that gets us there. It’s where we find a sense of significance, a sense of something greater. As Henri Matisse put it, "Creativity takes courage.”

I remember when I was studying at Oxford University, I longed for the noise of the calming surf. Instead, all I could hear was the occasional buzz of traffic outside and the silent enchantment of academia whispering in the quiet, cold, majestic city parks. Yet like the ocean it too in its own way was quietly calling me to find that “something to live for.”

Surely now in a world of powerful currents and unsuspecting waves, we need more than ever to find something to live for—something beyond ourselves. This era of rapid technological advancement, instability, division, and volatility underscores a heightened need for deeper discussions about meaning, hope, purpose, and what truly gives life value. Like a surfer paddling out toward the horizon, dropping in on a wave, and finding her line, we need to never give up the search for the immeasurable and fascinate our soul with this journey. For the surfer there is a great, almost deep joy in finding that ethereal line stretched out in the emerging pitch.

The wave, though external, compels us to look beyond our individual selves. It pushes us to experience something vast, transcending the confines of our self-centeredness and exposing us to a world—and potentially a hope—far grander than our limited perception.

As I carve up and down the face of the wave like that sculptor, I continually deepen myself into this essence of something greater, something bigger than me. I am ever drawn to its soulful re-enchantment as it gently but powerfully confronts me with the microcosm of my ‘me-ism’, with the truth that I was created to live for something and perhaps even for Someone vastly bigger than myself.

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