The Rip (2026)

The Rip arrives with the weary confidence of men who have made this kind of picture before, which is to say Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in a Joe Carnahan potboiler about Miami narcotics detectives who find twenty million dollars in a Hialeah attic and immediately begin suspecting each other of wanting it. The setup is old as dirt and the film knows it. Carnahan shoots the standoff with competence, the cast is deep, and the machine hums along for two hours without ever asking us to think about anything harder than who took the burner phone.

The ensemble is genuinely multiethnic. Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Sasha Calle, Daisuke Tsuji and Néstor Carbonell fill out the unit, but the film treats them as Miami cops because Miami cops look like that, not because anyone is making a point. A female captain, played with gravity, anchors the moral stakes, though the movie around her is a macho betrayal thriller with no thesis to articulate. There is no romance outside the heterosexual default, no environmental anxiety, no reflection on race or identity, no interest in bodies or brains that deviate from the standard issue action-movie model. The film has other things on its mind, mostly money and who is lying about it.

Greed drives the plot, but the target is crooked cops and cartel cash, not capital itself. Nobody delivers a speech. Nobody climbs onto a soapbox. The script, by its own producers' admission, was built to be reiterated three or four times for viewers half-watching on their phones, which is the opposite of sermonizing. It is a meat-and-potatoes genre exercise, and it seems content to be one.