“Are we the good guys?” Matt Damon’s Lieutenant Dane Dumars asks in The Rip (now streaming on Netflix). It’s the slogan tattooed on his right hand, but it’s also a question you might be asking throughout Joe Carnahan’s new cop thriller.
When Dumars’s Tactical Narcotics Team follows an anonymous tip to a local residence, they discover $20 million in cartel cash: an enormous “rip” for the team. Suddenly, Dumars’s tattoo is even more relevant. Is everyone on the team trustworthy? Or is someone a rat?
“There’s some real unanswered questions about who is and who isn’t dirty,” Ben Affleck, who plays Dumars’s partner and friend, Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne, tells Netflix. “But even in a more immediate sense: who you can trust standing next to you trying to count this money?”
As the sun sets, things in the house get darker and darker. The team is already on edge — and under FBI investigation — after the murder of their captain, Jackie Velez (Lina Esco). Partner turns on partner, bullets start flying, and the cartel is on the prowl. “You don't know who's good, who's bad, who's corrupt, what people's agendas are,” Damon tells Netflix. “The tension just kind of keeps getting ratcheted up. There are forces on the outside that are converging on them, and they're going to have to defend themselves.”
Because, to make matters worse, the team can’t leave the house until the money is counted. “They're stuck now because the rules in Florida and Miami-Dade are you have to count a seizure on-scene. You can't leave,” Carnahan tells Netflix. “And now they have to count the money, not knowing necessarily who to trust, including one another.”
While Dumars and Byrne will have to investigate on their own, you can read on to find out who can be trusted, and who’s sold their team down the river.
Dumars and Byrne’s first instinct is soon proven correct: The money is from the cartel.
Desi (Sasha Calle), the home’s owner, is an unwitting pawn in the organization’s game. The cartel paid Desi to place buckets of cash in the attic of her new home, inherited from her recently deceased grandmother. With plenty of funeral and medical expenses to pay, it was an offer the young woman couldn’t refuse. “She knows that she had to leave the house, she came back, and she got an envelope filled with cash,” Calle tells Netflix. “That's all, really.”
So, when threatening phone calls start coming through and the house is hit with a barrage of bullets, the team naturally blames the cartel. “The cartels have bought up full cul-de-sacs, and these houses are just sitting there,” Damon says. “They're using them as stash houses.” A blinking porch light outside is already spelling out “PIGS” in Morse code; why would criminals stop there?
But a nighttime chase quickly resolves that question. Byrne finds common cause with the cartel lookout who was communicating through the porch light. He even helps him run off the real culprits and coordinates a phone conversation with his cartel chief (Sal Lopez), who convinces Byrne and Dumars that the cartel didn’t fire a shot.
“One dead cop is bad for business, five dead cops will bankrupt even the best dope game,” Carnahan says. “And these guys aren't stupid. This, at the end of the day, is not that much money to them.” The money is cartel cash, but they’re willing to cut their losses. Whoever hit the garage is someone closer to home.
From the jump, Byrne is a bit suspicious of his old friend Dumars. “We've been peers for our careers, and now he’s been made the boss of the group,” Affleck says. “There are questions raised as to whether that's created some resentments.” But on top of that possible tension, Dumars is acting a little strange, even telling every member of the team a different number when asked how big the rip is.
“They're not calling it in,” Carnahan added. “Dumars has asked for everybody's phones and everybody's radios. No call-outs, nothing to dispatch, we're gonna sit on this for a second and figure out what we're doing, which is unusual.”
Dumars’ behavior also points some suspicion his way in the wake of Captain Velez’s murder. Even Byrne’s FBI agent brother Del (Scott Adkins) has his eye on Dumars “They think she was murdered by a cop,” Carnahan says. “Was it a cop on her own team? Was it someone else? You don’t know. And you also know that Byrne had a romantic entanglement with her. But she was also the one that promoted Dumars ahead of her boyfriend.” In other words, those resentments Affleck mentioned are building up.
Dumars’ current financial situation doesn’t help his case. “He's lost his son. He's heavily in debt because his marriage collapsed as a result of losing his son,” Carnahan says. “And he's not necessarily in the most sturdy of mental states.”
Desi also tells new officer Mike Ro (Steven Yeun) that she heard Dumars plotting with Officers Baptiste and Salazar (Teyana Taylor and Catalina Sandino Moreno) to steal a chunk of the rip. To Desi, Ro comes across as the most put-together member of the TNT, a tempting figure to confide in. “What's interesting is he’s also kind of new to the unit, and so for him, his allegiances run a little bit thinner,” Yeun tells Netflix.
Not that the thicker allegiances are helping at the moment. Dumars and Byrne ultimately come to blows, with Byrne accusing his boss and friend of fabricating the crime stopper tip that led them to Desi’s house, all part of a scheme to steal the rip.
The rest of the team break them up, but the partners’ relationship seems damaged beyond repair. They rush to finish the count and get out of the house, a mission made even more urgent as the house bursts into flames from a dropped candle.
DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler) arrives to pick up the money and transport it across town — with no backup, citing overtime restrictions. Byrne, Ro, Dumars, and Nix head in an armored truck to a DEA-held Wells Fargo to turn the money over. But Byrne quickly realizes the truck is going the wrong way, and Ro again accuses Dumars of trying to steal the money. So Dumars finally plays his trump card: everything that’s happened so far, every odd decision he’s made, has been part of a mole hunt within the Tactical Narcotics Team.
Dumars unspools the truth of the matter quickly and furiously, cutting every one of Ro’s accusations off with the facts. Yes, he told every member of the team a different number, to determine which of them would spread that number outside the house; the threatening phone call cited $150,000, a cash total only Ro heard. Yes, he offered the opportunity to steal the rip to Baptiste and Salazar; but a flashback to the other side of the conversation reveals Dumars clearly signaling that they’re being intentionally overheard. There was no crime stopper tip, just a text from Jackie to Dumars the night she died.
Finally, Dumars accuses Ro of using his burner phone to make the calls himself. Ro denies having a burner, but Byrne calls his bluff, revealing he’s recently been clued into Dumars’ scheme. “Bloody up the water, see what rides to the surface,” Dumars told Byrne, quoting his own proposed strategy to catch Velez’s killer. As it turns out, Dumars and Byrne’s throwdown was staged, and when Ro broke up the fight, Byrne palmed his burner phone for exactly this moment.
“In Mike Ro’s particular case, it was actually a layer deeper than betrayal of friends,” Yeun says. “It starts from a self-betrayal.” A quick Face ID on the burner confirms that betrayal, and then eyes turn to Nix. Why is this truck going in the wrong direction? Where is the backup? Why are the radios totally silent? Ro, fed up with the deception, hits redial, and Nix’s phone rings. He’s in on this $20 million heist too, and the pair of them killed Jackie to keep it quiet, before she could use the money as bait.
A shootout brings the truck to a stop, just in time to meet a blockade headed by Del, who was alerted to the situation by his brother via text. Ro takes off on foot, while Nix tears off in the stolen truck. Byrne borrows Del’s car, in spite of protests, and chases after him, igniting an explosive dual chase. Finally, both men are caught, and Nix loses a shootout with Byrne, who reveals the money was never in the truck to begin with. Meanwhile, Dumars arrests Ro, and the money, back in the hands of Baptiste, Salazar, and Desi, finds its way to the feds.
All’s well that ends well, for now. Desi gets a cut of the rip for her cooperation, and Byrne and Del hug it out. The final piece of tension emerges from a procedural detail: will the rip’s final total match the count performed by the Tactical Narcotics Team? It does, to the dime: $20,650,480, in a detail drawn directly from officer Chris Casiano’s true story that inspired the film.
“They're watching this counter, it hits a number, the final tally,” Carnahan says. “Chris removes a business card and shows it to the DEA guy, it's the same number, which I thought was lovely. There's not enough stories like that, where they do the right thing.”
Finally, Dumars says goodbye to Desi, and reveals the truth behind his tattoos. They’re not a somber reminder of his duty, necessarily. They’re a memorial to his son. “Are we the good guys?” was the last thing his son said to him; “We are and always will be” was the last thing he said to his son.
It’s another tribute to Casiano, whose own son died of leukemia. “It's such a sensitive topic, and it's the worst thing a parent could possibly go through,” Carnahan says. “But he was lovely, and he let me really delve into his life and tell this cop thriller with this deeply emotional, personal bent to it.”
Dumars and Byrne sit down on the beach and watch the sun rise, a young girl playing in the surf ahead of them. “Imagine being that fired up for a sunrise,” Byrne says. And then they hear her mother calling for her: “Jackie!”
As Baptiste says of Captain Velez earlier, “I feel like she made that happen from beyond.” In their final moments before a well-earned rest, Dumars and Byrne toast to the team member who started it all.
You can catch The Rip yourself, on Netflix now.
