From the opening minute of “Rebel Ridge,” I felt completely absorbed. As Aaron Pierre rides his bike blasting “The Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden, a police car encroaches on Pierre’s character Terry. Once the officer, played by David Denman, runs Terry off the road, causing damage to the bike and his elbows, a pit formed in my stomach.

Terry and the officer get into a nervous exchange in which it is revealed Terry is carrying over $30,000 in cash to a nearby courthouse to bail his cousin out of jail. Once a second officer appears on the scene and Terry is detained at gunpoint, it’s clear who the subject of vengeance of this revenge-thriller will be.

Adding insult to injury, Terry is released $30,000 poorer after the officers seize the money claiming they suspect a connection to cartel money. From here, the film takes off. In just a few minutes, we learn Terry is a driven man, the Shelby Springs police department is corrupt, and Terry is in a lot of danger.

It’s one of the most intense, economically paced opening scenes I’ve seen in a while. From there, the film keeps a humming pace. Events never drastically speed up or slow down, director Jeremy Saulnier keeps the low rumble of revenge intensely consistent throughout the whole runtime.

Terry quickly learns the immoral seizure of his cash is entirely legal and that he isn’t the first victim of this police force’s aggressive detaining. If you, like me, first heard of the epidemic police civil forfeitures from this film and thought it was too absurdly immoral to be true, complaints about the unrestricted laws have actually been around for years.

Back in 2021, a Forbes story about Philadelphia resident Nassir Geiger went viral after exposing a pattern of corrupt seizure within the city’s courts. Saulnier’s past three films, also all revenge thrillers, tackle real-world issues but “Rebel Ridge” may be the most prescient.

The way the film blends your expectations of the genre was the most impressive component. At its core, it’s a story you’d commonly see in Western films: a righteous man rolls into a small town, faces injustice, and seeks to rectify it.

But “Rebel Ridge” never delivers the massive bloody shootout you might expect from edge-of-your-seat revenge sagas. Instead, Terry uses non-lethal force to incapacitate and disarm the town’s crooked cops as the conspiracy grows.

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The most stunning sequence in the film comes at the pivotal reveal of who Terry is: a former Marine badass. In a tense standoff with the villainous police chief, played by Don Johnson, two other officers scramble to find as much background on the Marine as possible.

In a comical exchange, one of the officers discovers Terry is the founder of a Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, telling the chief “I think he’s on the Wikipedia page.” From here, Terry turns on his imposing action-hero aura like a light switch and the film truly takes off.

Along the way, Terry befriends a local litigator and forms a tenuous ceasefire with one of the more empathetic officers. He and his crew investigate the corruption, leading to the largest drag of the film. There is a period between the stellar first hour of the film and the electric final 40 minutes that truly tested my patience due to the amount of exposition.

But the conclusion makes the slightly bloated 130-minute run time worth it. Rather than a John Wick-esque shootout, Terry actively avoids violence from the entire police force while trying to deliver Narcan to the chief’s hostage and driving a bleeding-out cop to the hospital.

The tension doesn’t come from the audience rooting for Terry to triumph in his fight against the cops but rather triumph in his mission to avoid violence. The final shots of the film are expertly photographed, layered with so much catharsis that I immediately felt the need to start the film from the beginning.

“Rebel Ridge” is a must-watch revenge story full of expert filmmaking from Jeremy Saulnier and an impressive action-hero performance from Aaron Pierre. The film is now streaming on Netflix.