Joe Carnahan Primer: What Movies Should You Catch Up On Before ‘The Rip’ Comes to Netflix?

The next big Matt Damon/Ben Affleck team-up had its trailer drop recently, and anticipation seems high for The Rip, a hard-boiled-looking crime thriller debuting on Netflix in January. But while Affleck previously directed his buddy Damon in Air, and they’ve appeared in several movies together for writer-director Kevin Smith, a figure from Affleck’s past is handling The Rip: filmmaker Joe Carnahan, whose movies tend to specialize in cops, agents, killers, and occasionally killer wolves.

Carnahan’s movies have been wildly uneven; his last one, Shadow Force, is a total dud, coming on the heels of one of his best ever. So here’s a quick primer to which ones you might want to check out before The Rip becomes a presumed Netflix hit.

The Good

One of Carnahan’s best movies is also one of his less-seen. When Copshop appeared in theaters in 2021, Carnahan himself made reference to difficulties making the movie, which he seemed to consider compromised. Whatever went down on set, though, doesn’t really appear in the film itself, a modern western of sorts where a cop (Alexis Louder), a con artist (Frank Grillo), and a hitman (Gerard Butler, rumored to be the source of Carnahan’s troubles) stand off at a police station. It’s a twisty, well-acted genre exercise that hardly anyone saw during its brief theatrical release, and one of the better Butler thrillers of recent (or any) vintage.

Carnahan has also worked with another reliable thriller star: Liam Neeson, who starred in the only movie competing with Copshop for the honors of Carnahan’s best. The Grey was sold as a Neeson-versus-wolves actioner, but it’s more of an existential survival thriller, with a terrific Neeson performance and sort of a platonic ideal of Carnahan’s battle-damaged brand of machismo. It’s more refined than in his sophomore feature Narc, which put him on the map with a volcanic Ray Liotta performance but feels a bit sweaty and strenuous today. On the other hand, Liotta is no longer with us, meaning there’s a finite number of cop-on-the-edge performances to sample from him, so it’s well worth watching for fans of that actor, or the overall cop-thriller genre.

The Bad

It’s wild that Carnahan has the reins of a slick-looking Damon/Affleck thriller, because his previous film, this year’s Shadow Force, is low-rent junk about elite agents who must protect their child from a bunch of boring, endless shoot-outs. Carnahan usually gets more juice out of his action sequences than he does here; his A-Team movie isn’t very good, but it gets the silly job done. Shadow Force is just as ridiculous while also making forays into self-seriousness. It’s a tonal and visual mess. It doesn’t even have the distinctive (if super-derivative) 2000s-era post-Tarantino archness of Stretch, a misguided Patrick Wilson vehicle that went direct to video despite starring Wilson, Chris Pine, and Jessica Alba, among others. It’s all a bit too pleased with itself. Another Frank Grillo vehicle, Boss Level, got somewhat better notices than those two, while rehashing a tone of one more (and better-known) Carnahan picture.

The Affleck

Carnahan has already worked with Affleck once before; The Rip is due out around the twentieth anniversary of Smokin’ Aces, Carnahan’s follow-up to Narc. This crime comedy has one of those ensembles that’s retroactively become an all-star cast; in addition to Affleck, it features a pre-Deadpool Ryan Reynolds, a pre-Star Trek Chris Pine, a mid-comeback Jason Bateman, plus Liotta, Taraji P. Henson, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Matthew Fox, Alicia Keys, and Common. It’s one of those self-consciously chaotic movies were a bunch of colorful hitpeople descend upon a single location; mayhem, bullets, and wacky nicknames ensue. Most of the cast is doing the absolute most possible; best-slash-most-in-show goes to Jason Bateman as a drugged-out lawyer. Affleck isn’t actually a hitman; he plays a bail bondsman, possibly doing a Chicago-inflected impression of Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, eager to bring the target (Piven) to his court appearance. This was during the nascent days of Affleck’s first comeback, when he was experimenting with character-actor parts, which is to say he does not have a lot of screen time in this, and for some of it, Chris Pine is puppeting the mouth of his character’s corpse, pretending to receive absolution for killing him. (Not really a spoiler; it happens pretty early.) I’m not sure if I can recommend this movie, actually, but it sure is something to see.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.