“Does it hold up?” Matt Damon asks earnestly, before catching himself with a laugh: “Am I allowed to ask that?”
Damon’s anxiety is understandable—he and his old buddy Ben Affleck have teamed up again for The Rip, a new cop thriller from Joe Carnahan (Smokin Aces, The Grey), and aside from the people who worked on it, nobody’s seen it yet; later, when I talk to Carnahan, he’s similarly eager to hear reactions. Director and star can rest assured: The Rip is a tense and taut ride, sure to satisfy fans of Damon and Affleck who especially love when they get in their crime bag, aficionados of Carnahan’s gritty oeuvre, and anyone who just enjoys a good throwback thriller.
The film, which premieres on Netflix on January 16, 2026, focuses on a Miami police department on the brink of imploding after a beloved captain’s murder stirs up accusations of corruption. Damon and Affleck, both sporting impressively scruffy narco-beards, play a lieutenant and sergeant, respectively, who execute a rip—cop-speak for search and seizure of drug-related funds—along with the rest of their squad (a stacked cast including Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, Sasha Calle, and Kyle Chandler.) A game of cat-and-mouse ensues, suspicion and distrust mounts, and the only relief comes in the form of an adorable money-sniffing dog—until they fit the little guy with his own bespoke bulletproof vest, because shit is about to get that real.
Claire Folger/Netflix
Carnahan says he took inspiration from a real rip mission a friend who’d worked in Miami Dade PD’s Tactical Narcotics division undertook, but also from a more unlikely place. “I went through an unbelievably bad breakup, and it was really fraught with a lot of pain and anger. And in the weirdest way, man, it just reconstituted—I kept thinking of Back to the Future II, like give me trash and I’ll create fusion. I’ve never been good at therapy, and probably because there’s something deeply wrong with me that I’m immune to it,” Carnahan says, with a mad twinkle in his eye. “But I found this to be very therapeutic, and that script just kind of flew out of me.”
Affleck and Damon signed on in similarly quick fashion, taking the script on through Artists Equity, the industry-disrupting studio they’ve been running together for three years now. “Our goal is always to just make movies that we think we’ll like, which is really the same calculus we use in our own careers as actors,” Damon says, when asked about what passes muster as an AE film. “It kind of drives our creative team crazy, because they’re like, ‘What are we looking for?’ And we always just go, A good movie.”
Carnahan describes Artists Equity as “the vanguard of something that I think is really vital. Hopefully, a lot more artists adapt [like they have]; they’re doing things in a non-traditional way. I’ve worked for some absolute scoundrels, bums, thieves, and crooks, and had to make movies under really difficult conditions with just the worst… I’ll put air quotes, ‘producers.’ [Ben and Matt] are the cream of the crop. They’re just unimpeachable in what they do.”
