I was all set to give Rebel Ridge a superlative star rating within its first hour but as soon as the flick went from defense to offense, it fell hard. I was so disappointed in the final act from a director I’ve quite liked in the past.

The flick is about a guy who gets into trouble with a corrupt small town police force. He has to first extricate himself from these goons… and eventually figure out how and why they are corrupt.

I enjoyed director Jeremy Saulnier’s matter-of-fact, cerebral style of genre filmmaking in Green Room and Blue Ruin. I can see that style at play in this film, though its effectiveness shifts wildly as the film goes along.

In its first half, the way he writes and films the verbal jousts between our hero and the corrupt cops is fascinating. You can feel the tightrope he’s walking, calculating the rules he has to abide by to stay out of jail (and alive). The way these sequences are filmed have a concrete style to them, feeling believable without going for melodrama. I was on the edge of my seat through most of it, thinking I’d found one of my favorite films of the year.

But there’s a certain point when the main character goes on the attack where the film starts to unravel. Part of that is due to the frustration of him getting free and going back, part of it’s due to the filmmaker’s mistaken belief that the criminal conspiracy among the cops matters. I didn’t know WHY they were corrupt… what I’d learned was enough. But the film goes all Nancy Drew on a mystery that just wasn’t that important.

And its final action set pieces were full of dread-inspiring music but not dread-inspiring direction or storytelling. The drone of the music suggested I should be back on the edge of my seat, but I wasn’t. I think the director’s propensity for that matter-of-fact filmmaking style smacked into needing to be more energetic and action-packed given the scenarios established. Without that pacing, what should have been pulse-pounding and energetic wound up a little too methodical.

But it was good enough and the first half excellent, so I’m still giving the film a solid rating. I desperately wanted to like it more but it just grew too lackadaisical. When it needed to go hard, it went soft. It’s unfortunate, but this film needed to be shorter and tighter.

Score: 82