“The Rip” is a new low for Netflix’s mindless filmmaking

Several times throughout Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s new Netflix police procedural thriller, “The Rip,” Damon’s character — the disheartened and disillusioned Lieutenant Dane Dumars, who heads up a Miami-based tactical narcotics team — glances at his phone. It seems like a curious inclusion, given that the only thing to see on Dane’s phone is a picture of his late son, who died of childhood cancer. The loss inevitably took a toll on Dane, and in most movies, this would be the kind of foundational character detail expressed once early in the film, something that would give reason to all of Dane’s ensuing actions and behavior.

But that assumes the viewer is paying attention.

Under the Netflix original movie model — where characters often announce what they’re doing, while they’re doing it, so viewers who are half-watching while scrolling on their phone or loading the dishwasher can follow along — Dane must look at his phone anywhere from three-to-eight more times. Audiences at home must understand that Dane misses his son, and that his grief doesn’t go away, even when he and Detective Sergeant JD Byrne (Affleck) make a drug money bust worth millions of dollars. God forbid anyone watching TikToks at full volume in their living room while watching a movie at the same time happens to miss this integral plot detail; otherwise, they might think Matt Damon’s character is just mopey, instead of mopey with a dead son.

With as many Netflix original movies as I’ve seen and as cognizant as I am about them being constructed to appeal to the growing attention-deficient demographic, these futile additional aspects always take me by surprise. To the viewer who actually dares to pay attention to a Netflix film, the repetition is shocking, practically comical. Watching them is like being spoonfed by the streamer’s CEO, Ted Sarandos, who, by pioneering this content model, is waving a utensil in front of us like an airplane coming in for a landing. To Netflix executives who assume their viewers are as uninterested in films as they are, the audience is the baby, clapping our hands and going goo-goo-ga-ga for more freshly pureed cinematic mush.

“The Rip,” however, presents an intriguing case. It’s not quite of the slop caliber as, say, “Irish Wish” or “Tall Girl,” which present the crux of their narratives in their respective titles and boast a single star of note to hinge their success on. “The Rip” is filled with stars — Kyle Chandler, Steven Yeun and the recently Oscar-nominated Teyana Taylor support Damon and Affleck — and even manages a bit of decent action and thrills. But those successes are also what make the Netflix-ification of this film feel so completely unnecessary and patronizing. The good collides with the bad at such an intense pace that the resulting impact leaves the film comatose. In its vegetative state, the plot quickly becomes inert and frustrating, spinning its wheels in ways you never thought wheels could spin. If some of our biggest, most talented and most beloved movie stars are reducing themselves to films made for laundry folding, Hollywood is in a crisis that only the viewer can begin to solve.

Viewers who actually watch the Netflix films they stream have likely caught onto the repetitive nature of the Netflix model by now. (And if you haven’t, don’t consider yourself part of the problem. The model is designed to make watchers oblivious to the fact that they’re having everything over-explained to them.) It’s an open secret among general audiences and industry figures alike. What’s astonishing is that Damon openly admitted to what’s been whispered about behind closed doors for over a decade.

On a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” — sigh — Damon and Affleck sat down with Rogan to talk about their latest collaboration. When asked about making a film for Netflix, Damon began by discussing the movie’s action sequences, before segueing into a telling detail about the streamer’s model.

“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces,” Damon said. “One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third. You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now [streamers] are like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

While the admission likely resulted in some stern emails hitting a manager’s inbox, it’s ultimately refreshing that a star of Damon’s caliber and influence came out and actually said it. Still, it’s disconcerting that Damon offered the fact almost offhandedly, as if it were a given that he wasn’t willing to speak out against it or put up a fight, at least while a camera was rolling. To his credit, Affleck chimed in, adding that “Adolescence,” Netflix’s fantastic, award-winning limited series, avoided all of the streamer’s typical trappings.

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But Affleck’s example is an interesting one. Given its massive success, “Adolescence” clearly demonstrated that viewers don’t require over-explanation, but they will accept it, often unwittingly. As much as it’s a streaming company, Netflix is also a data aggregation and analysis company. They study viewer behavior within their interface to succinctly model their content toward what paying customers seem to want. If a viewer rewinds during this part, Netflix wants to know why. If they skip ahead, they’re desperate to know more about that, too. And if a movie plays front-to-back without any stops, they may just assume that their viewer fell asleep, even if, in reality, they were watching a movie all the way through. All of this and more — click data, watch times, what subcategories a user frequents the most, what stars they enjoy, which genres they love and which ones they hate — factor into the finished product. Every Netflix film you watch is designed with your and millions of other people’s habits in mind. Isn’t that thoughtful?

Not when the resulting film is as banal as “The Rip.” If this is what Netflix has determined that viewers want, we need to screw with their data, and fast. Writer-director Joe Carnahan aims for the steadily heightening tension and astonishing action set pieces of great Michael Mann crime capers like “Heat” and “Thief,” but there’s a reason his film can’t match those classics. “The Rip” is consumed by the need to expound and interpret its own narrative at every turn.

In one scene, a civilian asks Lieutenant Dane what the acronyms tattooed on both his hands stand for. Instead of brushing the question off and going about his business, which would create interest in the viewer that could pay off later in the film, Dane explains them immediately, only to explain them again at the end of the film with no more emotional thrust than the first clarification. Several sequences find the members of the tactical narcotics team incessantly repeating their fears that one of their own is skimming off the top of their drug money bust, banging the viewer over the head with the fact that, at some point, someone’s going to try to steal something.

During other moments, smartphones pop up so randomly and uselessly on-screen that I had to wonder whether some part of the Netflix model dictates that, if you show a phone in the frame, viewers are more likely to perk their heads up from their own devices. This is the only possible way to make sense of a baffling aside in the middle of the movie where, during a moment of high tension, Dane and JD FaceTime the leader of the cartel, who tells them — with the most over-explained syntax — “The cartel wants you to know that we had nothing to do with the men who violently attacked you tonight.” Thankfully, the cartel has a PR person ready to release official statements at all times. Otherwise, this case may never get solved!

But the real cherry on top is the latest in a line of third-act twists that aren’t just twists, but ways to repeat the plot in case a viewer might not have been listening. If you’ve seen any of Netflix’s “Knives Out” films, you know how this works. (And, to be fair, this tactic is more common in the mystery genre, though no less frustrating when the series of reveals is so far-fetched it seems designed just to mess with a viewer’s head.) The screenwriter goes out of their way to coddle the audience, showing them everything they just watched, but with an added layer of new information to fill in the gaps so the twist makes sense. Except, in the case of “The Rip,” the whole film is a gap. Nothing makes much sense to begin with. Every plot detail feels like a balloon drifting ever so slowly into the air, waiting for a character to grab the string and yank the story balloon back down to reiterate it.

All of this makes for an exasperating experience, but what’s most aggravating is that we’ve stood for this for so long. Enough people have watched these movies — or let them autoplay as they snooze on the couch — that Netflix believes films like “The Rip” are truly what their audiences want. Maybe they’re right, but like Affleck, I think intelligent, well-made offerings like “Adolescence” prove otherwise. The demand is there for original programming and films that have respect for their audience, and that are unwilling to compromise their vision for the sake of data. What we have the power to do is not rewind or watch all the way through, but to turn something off. If the viewer doesn’t like it or feels like they’re being obnoxiously pandered to through repetition and over-explanation, the best choice is to watch something else. Mess with the data, confuse the algorithms and take back control, at least until the next “Knives Out” film drops.

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