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

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

4 October 2024

5 min read

Assisted dying and the cult of kindness

I witnessed an assisted death. We need to be honest in the debate about it.

Matthew Hall

Matthew is an author and screenwriter.

A tableau shows minature figures of two people, one sitting on a life size syringe and the other stands

Etactics Inc on Unsplash.

The Assisted Dying Bill is likely to be passed into law this autumn, the government having promised to ‘rush it through’. The debate will invariably be conducted in a fog of euphemistic language in which ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ will feature heavily on both sides, while the main point is likely to be missed: the legalisation of euthanasia or AD, marks a tectonic shift from a Christian to a post-Christian society and should be a wake-up moment for dozing Christians.

I was recently present when my aunt, an artist who had become a Canadian citizen, died by euthanasia in her own home while in the very early stages of motor neurone disease. She was 72, divorced, living independently, fully mobile (although she had lost the use of one arm) and was laughing and joking up to the moments before the doctor (or ‘The Killer’ as her son called him) injected the first dose of the lethal cocktail. It happened at 7pm on a Tuesday evening. She had made the phone call requesting her death at 3pm the previous Sunday – yes, a Sunday. Service of a kind our NHS can only dream of.

As a reluctant witness to what I consider a murder-suicide, I was nevertheless beguiled by the relatively clean ending (although there was some disturbing gurgling that apparently occurs as a result of the lungs filling with fluid) to a life that was about to become very difficult. Her two older siblings, including my mother, are each currently several years into slow deaths from combined Parkinson’s and dementia.

I am an almost daily visitor and a secondary carer to my mother, and while she is mute, benign and seemingly contented, the toll on my stepfather and on me is enormous. I often pray for it all to be over – it’s an endless grind and her former self would be utterly horrified to see herself this way! – and yet, as a Christian, I have to see purpose in it. One thing it certainly does do, is force carers to be selfless and compassionate in the strict sense of the word, which is ‘to suffer with’.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible.

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My aunt didn’t want the trial of becoming ill and dependent, and the Canadian government gave her an opt-out which she grabbed the instant she received her diagnosis. Confirmation by two doctors that she was terminally ill and of sound mind – almost a trifling formality – got her immediate approval. She was, to use her kind of language, ‘out of here’ a mere three months later.

How could she have been so cavalier and determined to die, despite the protests of her son, nephew and granddaughters? She was, in hindsight, a perfectly minted product of the 1960s who believed above all in doing her own thing - whatever felt right. Such notions were anathema to her Christian parents and their dutiful wartime generation but are now the norm.

Like many who came of age to the sound of the Beatles, she toured the spiritual supermarket and picked out the nice bits from Christian, pagan and Eastern religions – predominantly those that allow you to think that life is about ‘being in tune’ or feeling good about yourself. This did most definitely not include becoming immobile and having strangers change her nappy. She believed in an afterlife, ‘love’, aliens and reincarnation but definitely not in judgement or consequences for her suicide.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible, with the added bonus of leaving her assets to her family.

The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge.

Polls in Canada and the UK show that the vast majority would consider this a win all round. According to Opinium, 75 per cent of British adults support AD. In political terms this a ‘bridge issue’ almost without comparison, uniting 78 per cent of Conservatives with 77 per cent of Labour supporters, yet no issue should more starkly dramatise the unbridgeable chasm between Christian and secular world views.

The sharpness of this divide has, however, been successfully obscured by the insidious (and to my mind, diabolical) Cult of Kindness that has inveigled itself into both secular and Christian space. Imitating Christian virtues, it subverts them by subtly perverting language - by using ‘compassion’ when what is meant is ‘convenience’, for example – and by making ‘happiness’ rather than self-sacrifice the highest good. This leads both sides into dishonesty and self-delusion.

The biggest pro-AD lie is that it is merely an escape route for the tiny few facing the most intolerable suffering with no additional consequences. The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge. It is now the fifth most common cause of death and climbing by 30 per cent each year. Every seriously ill Canadian now feels some pressure to address the option. Cases of people choosing AD out of despair, depression or at the suggestion of a lazy or uncaring State official are already numerous. Those who have signed an advance consent waiver setting a date for their euthanasia in the event of their mentally incapacity, are now being terminated. In some cases, the demented refuse to cooperate and are euthanised under forced sedation. The State is already saving money and families are saving their inheritances. Life itself has been downgraded.

The Christian side indulges in even bigger untruths. Windy episcopal speeches about advances in palliative care avoid the hard fact that denying AD involves many suffering prolonged and painful deaths while family finances are destroyed and carers worn down to a husk. The pill can’t be sugared: thou shalt not kill is absolute, not an invitation for an ethical discussion. The point is so fundamental that to avoid it and be drawn into discussing the minutiae of legislation is a betrayal of the faith.

Christians won’t save the secular world from AD and its consequences, but the current debate is an opportunity for honesty and for Christians to save themselves from the delusion that the true virtue of compassion can be inverted to justify killing.

The Christian religion began with an agonising death of a kind which its scriptures exhorts its followers not to fear. It’s a tough message: God doesn’t promise the comfort we would like in this life. We do have the means and the duty to alleviate much suffering, but death as a consumer choice is simply off the table.