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?

Explainer

Creed

Film & TV

Politics

Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the quest for Truth

Space for neutrality is shrinking; two French philosophers explain why

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

BBC.

Watching American news always feels very different from the British version. Changing channels from CNN to Fox News feels like you're switching to a different universe altogether, as on each one you're getting a very different interpretation of events. The BBC has always been thought to rise above this. In the UK and beyond, through the World Service, the Beeb has, until recently, been viewed as an oasis of impartial, authoritative reporting in a world of propaganda and state-run media.

Now, allegations of bias, with evidence that BBC editors doctored a speech of Donald Trump to make it sound worse than it was, one-sided coverage of transgender issues, and perceived anti-Israel prejudice, have led to doubts about the truthfulness of BBC reporting, and the resignations of the Director General Tim Davie and its CEO, Deborah Turness.

It does seem that the BBC has fallen into an echo chamber, reflecting the generally liberal, metropolitan left-leaning ethos of the chattering classes. And that is a problem, especially for a taxpayer-funded corporation. At the same time, it is much harder for media companies these days to be neutral. Once upon a time, there was perhaps a broad space for impartiality and a general trust that institutions like the BBC could be trusted to tell the truth. Trying to be politically and culturally balanced these days, however, is like trying to walk along an ever narrowing mountain arête with an increasingly slim path of independence, while the steep and sheer slopes of the culture wars beckon on either side. The idea of a media platform maintaining strict neutrality is becoming harder and harder to sustain these days.

In Britain, that narrow arête has become smaller and smaller, with the BBC perceived as falling on one side of the debate, and GB News emerging to offer a perspective from the other, offering different assessments on what's going on, increasingly mirroring their American counterparts.

Now there is a reason why this space for neutrality is narrowing, rooted in cultural and philosophical developments over the past 50 years or more.

Foucault’s challenge

In the 1970s and early 80s, French philosopher Michel Foucault taught a whole generation of students - and his ideas became embedded in universities across the world - that claims to truth were in essence assertions of power. Foucault had been a Marxist, believing that power had to be wrested away from the hands of the ruling classes and placed in the hands of the proletariat. After the Paris student riots of the late 1960s, he changed his mind and started to believe that power is never concentrated in one place. It flows in multiple directions in any human relationship or institution. In such interactions, all kinds of power dynamics are at play, and you need to be very watchful to notice how they work. Power produces ‘truth’ - in other words a justification for its existence - and such ‘truth’ produces power, in that this ‘truth’ reinforces the power relations it was designed to justify. He often claimed not to be making a moral judgement – in fact moral judgments were irrelevant: “My point”, he said, “is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.” If all truth is power, then nothing is neutral. Everything is dangerous. You can’t trust anyone.

The result is that there is really no such thing as a neutral, absolute truth. All claims to truth come from a particular perspective on things. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ that stands above all our limited perspectives, and therefore the idea of finding ultimate absolute truth is fruitless.

Foucault’s target was the idea inherited from the Enlightenment that we could find truth through impartial rational inquiry. So for him, the idea that something like the BBC was an arbiter of neutral, rational truth was a mirage all along. The irony is that if the BBC has drifted into a left-leaning echo chamber, it has wandered into space deeply influenced by Foucault’s ideas – ideas which by definition make its claim to any kind of neutrality increasingly difficult to sustain.

The prevalence of these ideas explains why it is harder and harder for news outlets to remain neutral, or claim to offer the truth of things.

Pascal’s perspective

So what does Christian theology say to this? At one point in his Pensées, another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal (unlike Foucault, a Christian one from the seventeenth century), says to the Foucault-type sceptic of his own day:

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

In other words, it's impossible to be a total sceptic about truth. Even the most progressive philosopher puts the kettle on and expects it to boil. He wakes in the morning expecting the sun to rise. There is such a thing as capital-T Truth and an order to the world that we didn’t create, and can be relied upon. We simply have to receive it and be grateful for it.

So far, so conservative. Yet Pascal then casts doubt on our ability to know that truth absolutely:

“Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our reach and is an unattainable quarry, that it is not to be found here on earth, but really belongs in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Pascal agrees with Foucault, that absolute truth is unattainable to us here, at least if we think we can find it by some process of impartial human reason. Only God knows the truth. Our perspectives are inevitably limited and the only way we can know the ultimate truth is if it is revealed to us.

Which points to the heart of what a Christian believes about truth - that ultimately it is not so much rational and propositional but personal. Jesus does not say ‘here is the truth’, or ‘this is the truth’, but ‘I am the truth’.

Truth, in other words, is not just something you read on a page. It is not the product of brainy people sitting in a room analysing the data. Data always has to be interpreted and that's when fallible, inevitable and unspoken human prejudice creeps in. Truth is personal. You see it in a life – most perfectly in the life of Jesus. And if it is to be found here and now, it comes out of a life that has learned to be like Jesus, truthful in all kinds of simple personal interactions, honest even when it's inconvenient, generous even when you have little to give.

Truth, in Christian understanding, is a quality of life. It is not something that can be expected to arise from some august body of clever people – the Royal Society or the BBC. The BBC, like ITN, GB News, CNN, and Fox – and like the rest of us - will always be biased - and maybe it’s better to acknowledge that than try to hide it. To have a limited take on things is part of the human condition.

The only way we can rise above that to the ‘truth that comes from above’ as the Bible calls it, a truth which is “pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” is the spiritual path of inner growth, through prayer, the practice of goodness and compassion.

Truth is not something we possess but something we grow towards. When the BBC – or any corporation for that matter - embraces the spiritual path of yearning for the ‘truth that comes from above’, then we might get nearer to trusting it again.

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