The Rip Review: A Solid Netflix Thriller That Hits Hard Early and Cleans Up Just Enough Late

Joe Carnahan’s The Rip is a January 2026 Netflix crime thriller built around a very streaming-friendly hook: a Miami-Dade narcotics team finds a hidden stash of millions, and the second that money appears, trust starts evaporating. The movie stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, with Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Sasha Calle, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, and Kyle Chandler rounding out the ensemble. It’s inspired by a real Miami police case, and that true-crime grime helps give the whole thing a little more weight than the average algorithm-built action movie.

As a watch, The Rip works. The action is good, the tension is real, and Damon and Affleck bring exactly the kind of lived-in chemistry you want from a movie like this. It never feels like they’re straining to sell the bond or the suspicion; that history is just there, which helps the movie move fast without having to over-explain every relationship beat. That matters, because this is a film that absolutely feels like it starts in act two. There’s very little warm-up. It throws you into the situation, assumes you’ll catch up, and just starts firing plot at you. Sometimes that gives the movie real momentum. Other times it makes it feel like you missed the first 25 minutes and are spending the rest of the runtime trying to fill in emotional blanks yourself.

That fast-start structure is both the movie’s strength and its weakness. On the plus side, it keeps The Rip from getting bogged down. It plays like a solid “Friday night, hit play, no regrets” Netflix option: tough guys, dirty money, shifting loyalties, and enough paranoia to keep the story moving. On the downside, the lack of buildup means some character choices and story turns don’t land as hard as they should. There are holes in the plot, or at least thin spots in the logic, and for a while it feels like the movie is hoping momentum alone will cover them up.

To its credit, The Rip does circle back and patch more of that than you expect. The late reveals and cleanup work are not perfect, but they’re satisfying enough that the movie earns its ending. It doesn’t fully transcend its genre setup, and it never becomes the great crime thriller it occasionally hints at being, but it does something plenty of Netflix originals fail to do: it stays watchable, keeps escalating, and lands with enough purpose that you don’t feel like you wasted your time. That probably makes it the best kind of Netflix movie—solid, entertaining, a little messy, but good enough that you’d recommend it with a few caveats instead of an apology. Critics landed in roughly that zone too, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic both indicating generally favorable reviews.