The Netflix Action Thriller Stephen King Recommends Is A Must-Watch

Throughout film history, there have been companies and, for certain stretches, whole studios notorious for churning out garbage. Obviously, American International Pictures had a rep for schlock, but they hit for a shockingly high average at their late 1950s and '60s peak. There's also Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus' Cannon Films, which sparkled with its constellation of B-list action stars like Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson, but Golan was a filmmaker himself with dreams of respectability who courted legit directors like Franco Zeffirelli, Jerry Schatzberg, and Andrei Konchalovsky to make Academy Awards-worthy movies for his exploitation factory.

One of the more outlandishly awful runs from any production entity was Hollywood Pictures, which was created by Disney to nurture fledgling executives and feed film-starved multiplexes — lacking in the wake of MGM/UA, Lorimar and DEG's financial difficulties — with new movies. Disney wasn't sending its best to Hollywood Pictures, so agents were loath to let their top clients make movies there. Though the brand got off to a decent start quality-wise with Frank Marshall's "Arachnophobia," it quickly became a dumping ground for low-aiming programmers. Between 1990 and 2007, the film's logo became a symbol of dreck. "If it's the Sphinx, it stinks!"

Today's major streamers are turning into billion-dollar Hollywood Pictures, but no company seems to care less about its original output than Netflix. For years they reminded me of Elie Samaha's Franchise Pictures, which financed movie star vanity projects no other studio in town would touch. Initially, movies like "War Machine," "Triple Frontier" and "Bright" had either failed to launch elsewhere or lacked original hooks that didn't appear likely to become reliable IP. Now, they primarily treat movies as catalogue stuffing and make massive deals with blockbuster producers like the Russos to look the part of a major studio. As a result, they release a load of insipid, skippable product.

So when they accidentally release a film of merit ... well, people usually skip it, too. This could've been the fate of Jeremy Saulnier's "Rebel Ridge," but thanks to rave reviews and a ringing endorsement from one of the most popular novelists alive, it's still generating buzz 10 days after its debut.

In the early evening of September 14, 2024, Stephen King took to X (formerly Twitter) to fire off a terse bit of praise for Saulnier's taut action triumph. Per the one-man publishing phenomenon:

"REBEL RIDGE: If this is a Netflix original, it's one of the best. A thinking man's RAMBO. No diss to David Morrell."

It is a Netflix original (Saulnier's second for the company after 2018's "Hold the Dark"), and it is easily one of the best movies to ever bear the company's logo (up there with Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman," Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma," and Bong Joon-ho's "Okja"). Even when John Boyega was actively making the movie (before he abruptly bolted due to what his representatives have called "family issues"), "Rebel Ridge" had the potential to be a "First Blood" riff supercharged with fiery commentary on racist police abuses in the United States. Aaron Pierre took over for Boyega as protagonist Terry Richmond, and is a model of controlled ferocity as a young man who's just trying to bail his trouble-prone cousin out of jail. When the corrupt local authorities confiscate his cash bail money, they start a war with a former Marine with a particular set of very lethal skills.

King is a movie buff, but he's unpredictable in both his tastes and propensity to chime in when a movie shakes him up. "Rebel Ridge" clearly pushed the right buttons. And he's absolutely right. I adore Ted Kotcheff's adaptation of David Morrell's novel "First Blood," but it's a visceral experience from start to finish. There's no clandestine motive to law enforcement's abuse of Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo. Brian Dennehy's sadistic sheriff just doesn't want drifters in his town, and he isn't above torturing them to make sure they never come back. What nuance there is in Kotcheff's film comes from Richard Crenna, who, as Rambo's former commanding officer, lends insight into the intense survival mindset of highly trained Green Berets.

"Rebel Ridge" has a good deal more on its mind than that. But while King has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald J. Trump and a supporter of Black Lives Matter, I'm not sure it's the themes that got him fired up. It's the storytelling. Ever since his sophomore effort, "Blue Ruin" (one of the very best movies of the 2010s), Saulnier has displayed an uncanny gift for seamlessly inventive plotting. I do my best to walk into a new Saulnier movie knowing as little as possible, but even if I've got a thumbnail sketch of the narrative, I know the story is going to unfold in a gracefully unpredictable manner.

I think "Blue Ruin" is still his best work to date, but "Rebel Ridge" is his most impressive accomplishment in that it hits the rousing notes we expect from an action film in the vein of "First Blood" without turning into a full-scale bloodbath with a notable body count. Terry puts a hurting on many a redneck cop, but he doesn't kill anyone — even after they throw his cousin to the wolves in prison. Terry wants to bring these abusive officers to justice, and in attempting to bring them in alive he is nearly killed several times over. Whether he's achieved his objective by the end of the movie opens up questions about our horribly corrupt justice system. But I love that Terry is a righteous Rambo who, unscarred by hellish abuse in the Vietnam War, has the intellectual wherewithal and combat skill to keep from killing the men who are aggressively trying to kill him.

It takes nimble, thoughtful writing to thread this needle, and Saulnier does it with bruising élan. So do what the author of (probably) one of your favorite books advises, and watch "Rebel Ridge" ASAP. If you subscribe to Netflix, this might encourage them to make and distribute better movies than, say, "Red Notice."