The Rip is the pip.

Joe Carnahan has always been a filmmaker who prefers the smell of cordite and unwashed denim over the sterile polish of modern blockbusters, and The Rip finds him revelling in his craft. While the reuniting of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as Miami-Dade narcotics officers might draw the eye on the ever-expanding menu of streaming content, it’s the solid nourishment offered by this solid meat and potatoes cop thriller that will satisfy the most.

When Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Damon) and Sergeant JD Byrne (Affleck) lead their specialised unit into a Hialeah stash house on a tip that yields a staggering $20 million in cartel cash. But once the cash is out in the open, fractures start to emerge in the unit. Before the night is out, there’ll be betrayal, bullets and bloodshed.

The Rip is a film that understands the specific gravity of greed; once that much money is in the room, the oxygen begins to thin, and Carnahan’s script wisely lets the resulting paranoia provide the narrative momentum. It’s here that the casting of Damon and Affleck reveals itself as a masterstroke; their dynamic carries a lived-in weight that no amount of rehearsal could hope to recreate. Damon’s Dumars is a man hollowed out by personal tragedy, Affleck, playing a more volatile brute force thinker. It’s their friction that constantly threatens to provide the spark that will blow up the powder keg. There’s none of the slick, quippy banter of a buddy-cop procedural; rather the two play it as the exhausted, coded communication of men who have seen too much of the same shit. Steven Yeun’s watchful Mike Ro, Catalina Sandino Moreno’s dog handler Detective Lolo Salazar and Teyana Taylor’s Numa Baptiste provide solid support, navigating the events as professionals caught in a suddenly dysfunctional unit of shifting allegiances, bathed in the shadowy amber light of the film’s palate.

It’s often an intimately staged thriller (at least until the finale’s more Michael Bay-esque car chase and gun play), almost a chamber piece with the main action taking place in confined spaces, thriving on the claustrophobic, oppressive feeling of being under siege. The camera work is restless but never incoherent, tracking the physical space of the stash house with a tactical precision that makes the sporadic eruptions of violence feel visceral and authentic. The inclusion of Wilbur, the money-sniffing beagle, provides rare moment of levity in a script that otherwise keeps its jaw firmly set and the twists, when they inevitably come, aren’t shocking or unexpected but they are neat and satisfying enough that The Rip ends up being a pleasingly robust entry in the “crooked cop” subgenre.