‘The Rip’ Is the First Proper Ben Affleck/Matt Damon Team-Up in 25 Years. Was It Worth the Wait?

Is there a famous onscreen duo who’s spent less time on screen together than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck? The two actors grew up together and have been close friends for far longer than either has been famous, and appeared in several of their earliest films together: both extras in Field of Dreams, both supporting players in School Ties. They famously won an Academy Award for writing Good Will Hunting, which they both acted in – Damon in the leading role, Affleck as strong support as the best friend – and helped Kevin Smith secure a release for Dogma simply by quickly reuniting in it. There, they shared almost all of their scenes as a pair of bickering fallen angels attempting to exploit a loophole to get back into heaven.

Smith turns out to be responsible for a number of Affleck/Damon crossovers: Damon has tiny roles in the Affleck starrers Chasing Amy and Jersey Girl, and they spoof themselves in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, seen filming a Will Hunting sequel (while Affleck earlier reprises his Chasing Amy role, too). In the years following Good Will Hunting making them both into stars, Smith’s films sometimes felt like the only things keeping them together onscreen, even as their offscreen friendship continued.

At times, their many films apart could seem redundant; how was it that they both made entirely separate poker movies?! They’ve also both been directed by George Clooney (in two of his worst movies – bonding experience!) and Damon starred in multiple movies with Ben’s younger brother Casey. (And how has Steven Soderbergh never snagged the elder Affleck for anything, not even a cameo?) In recent years, Affleck and Damon formed the production company Artists Equity, and vowed to work together more often as actors, too. They co-wrote and co-starred in The Last Duel, and Affleck directed them both in Air – though in both movies, Affleck is more of a colorful supporting presence to Damon’s star.

The Rip brings them back together again as co-leads for arguably the first time since Dogma, with a lack of ceremony that’s easy to appreciate but starts to bleed over into the movie itself. For better or worse, the Damon-Affleck partnership has never really been about marketing them as a package doing buddy shtick. That sensibility is most prevalent in Dogma, where they’re also part of a large ensemble. What they more often bring to the table is a familiarity and ease with each other, something The Rip takes advantage of by casting them as colleagues – cops in Miami on the same task force.  

The task force is known as the Tactical Narcotics Team, or TNT, which may telegraph where director Joe Carnahan sees this movie playing in the future – or rather, in the past, because watching guy movies on TNT on a lazy Sunday afternoon isn’t really much of a thing anymore. The Rip feels very much yanked from precisely the period where Affleck and Damon were working a lot, but not with each other; nothing about their characters really indicates that they couldn’t have made more or less the same move in 2005. In a sense, it’s almost a corrective, as if Carnahan, Damon, and Affleck are pretending it was this way all along. They may be consolidating their star power for the streamers, where legacy names can resist retirement in comfort, but The Rip can at least simulate business as usual.

That might account for its dynamic with cop characters, which is pure post-Training Day stuff about hunting for a cop killer and investigating a “stash house” where the team (led by Damon, also including Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, and Catalina Sandino Moreno) discovers a suspiciously massive amount of money. Loyalties fray and alliances form as the crew tries to figure out why they’ve stumbled upon this money and who might be willing to abscond with it. There’s also an element of a siege thriller as the stash house starts to receive threatening phone calls, urging the police to simply walk away. The house’s keeper (Sasha Calle) doesn’t seem to know much, but she knows enough to get nervous as the sun goes down. (There aren’t any vampires on this siege, however.)

In this kind of movie, cop action is all pretty recursive and self-reflexive: lots of talk about finding a cop killer, which cops might be dirty, whether or not IA will get involved and interfere with cop business, and no real sense that the police have any kind of relationship to their communities. The Rip portrays a cloistered and sometime self-aggrandizing police force without indicating how that might affect their policing style. In other words, this takes place in a world where 20 years’ worth of attention to police brutality hasn’t yet ruined the cop-movie fun (or violated its self-seriousness over what a cop movie should be about).

Evoking that movie-meets-vocational world, especially with these stars teamed up at the center, can be hard to resist: hard-boiled dialogue, testy camaraderie, procedural slang. It’s part 1940s noir and part crime novel written by some guy who used to be on the force. Damon and especially Affleck have made movies like this before (Netflix’s Triple Frontier puts Affleck in a similar situation, albeit not as a police officer), and lord knows so has Carnahan – which only lends The Rip its comfort-watch bona fides. The stash house itself is located in an eerily quiet suburban-looking cul-de-sac; that’s where a large chunk of the movie takes place, too, and Carnahan lays on the atmosphere. Compared to Narc or Copshop, this is a far more restrained reworking of pulp standbys. (Carnahan was inspired by a friend on the Miami force, likely nudging him away from bad-taste pyrotechnics and toward a credulousness that the police in general may not deserve, even if one has a tragic real-life backstory.) There’s no shaky-cam, less scenery-chewing, more letting the grit accumulate naturally. Maybe that’s the only way Damon and Affleck couldn’t make this work 15 or 20 years ago; maybe back then, they’d have to sweat a little more to cop that authority. Affleck in particular is convincingly grizzled without overdoing it. Damon walks around with a scruffy beard.

Ultimately, though, against all of the movie’s respectable craft and decent entertainment value, there’s a pervasive sense that the material is gradually sinking beneath the actors. A quarter-century since Damon and Affleck were co-leads, and this is what they’re showing for it? Beards and stash houses and dirty cops? It’s possible to ignore the refusal to even acknowledge the reputational shift of the police in this country, but The Rip is ultimately undone by its own reverence. It’s fun enough to watch Affleck and Damon get testy with one another, but it’s all so sensible, as if any excess needling or wheedling (beyond Affleck repeatedly calling Damon “dude”) would be untoward. The very seriousness that makes it a credible combination of ’40s and ’00s crime pictures squanders Affleck and Damon’s sense of humor. Unlike Ray Liotta or Denzel Washington, they’re not perfectly natural with that police-lifer weariness.

They’re not bad, either; it’s not a case of handsome Hollywood guys who can’t toughen up. The Rip just doesn’t give them much to chew on, much to jostle over. A sorta-subplot about Damon’s character undergoing a recent personal tragedy, though reality-based, feels like it’s been brought in from an entirely different Damon movie. Affleck’s character, meanwhile, is nursing a loss of his own that the movie keeps repressing to better preserve some plot-related mysteries. The Rip isn’t a bad movie, but in trying to keep its central partnership low-fuss, it also neglects to make us care.

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.

Stream The Rip on Netflix