Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s latest team-up brings cop drama, plenty of mystery, and oodles of tension in a sharp, engaging thriller for Netflix.

The Rip
Directed By: Joe Carnahan
Written By: Joe Carnahan
Starring: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Sasha Calle
Release Date: January 16, 2026 on Netflix

When a Miami-Dade police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) is murdered, the specialized unit she was over (the Tactical Narcotics Team) comes under heavy suspicion. As leads seem to go nowhere, the federal agents and internal affairs officers investigating the homicide fear a history of corrupt cops throughout the department is a factor.

Considering the team is made up of only a handful of officers, obviously tensions are incredibly high. Not only are they still reeling from the death of their Captain—a friend—they’ve got pressure from the FBI, along with concerns about their task force being disbanded. Everyone is certainly on edge.

TNT consists of a five main detectives. There’s Lieutenant Dane (Matt Damon), who’s been recently promoted to the role despite having reservations about still being a cop. Sergeant JD Byrne (Ben Affleck) is Dane’s close friend who lost out on the LT spot and had a personal relationship with Captain Velez. Then there’s Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa (Teyana Taylor), and Lolo (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who are eager to do their jobs but also weary at all the suspicion and seeming lack of recognition for their efforts.

When they set out on a bust, the team inadvertently stumbles into something major. Something that may have been the reason Captain Velez was killed; several millions of dollars of Cartel money. The bust (or “Rip”) becomes anything but ordinary, as they find themselves essentially boxed in at a culdesac, with an unknown caller threatening to slaughter them all if they don’t leave within thirty minutes.

With no backup coming, the officers find themselves questioning their loyalty to one another. Is the Cartel really attacking them, or has one of their own gone rogue and looking to steal the money they’ve found? Considering a mystery sits at the heart of the story and drives the characters’ actions, I’ll keep the story details at that. Definitely more fun to go into this one fresh.

By and large, The Rip feels like an old-school crime drama which is both good and bad. Bad in that it relies on some typical cliches for certain bits (though I greatly enjoyed how the main mystery aspect is treated) and it’s action pieces don’t do anything new/groundbreaking. The good, however, is that it’s a pretty top-tier example of this kind of genre fare. Sure, it’s not breaking the mold, but what it gives you is a great time that gets the blood-pumping.

The film brings together an interesting blend of genres. There’s definitely the cop drama element, with corruption and greed at the forefront, along with a little bit of a heist movie tossed in as well. You’ve got the action set pieces, but there’s also a bit of noir over the whole thing. There are numerous twists and turns (which I’m not spoiling), with many of the characters have their own motives you’re never quite sure of. The combination of it all makes for a thrilling movie that keeps you on your toes and is never boring.

It’s made all the more fun to watch thanks to the characters in play. Damon and Affleck’s iconic chemistry is in full force here; completely selling you on the idea of buddy cops who may—or may not—be at odds. While they take the main focus, the rest of the characters manage to be equally engaging.

Within a few short minutes, you absolutely believe the Tactical Narcotics Team have a long history with one another. You can sense the familial nature that comes from a small group working together for years and years…Plus I just love Teyana Taylor and everything she does.

What I enjoyed most about The Rip is how well it handles the mystery aspect of the story. This push and pull between trust and betrayal is the primary driver in the story. This small, usually close-knit team are forced into a close quarters situation with time running against them. This dynamic allows for some tense interactions as it becomes clear their trust in one another is being put to the ultimate test.

The way the story unfolds does a fantastic job of keeping the twists and turns underwraps. Like I said, it uses familiar tropes, but it’s also aware enough to know when to use them to their advantage. So even when I thought I had things figured out—because of how certain cliches would normally pan out—it managed to genuinely surprise me.

Perhaps more importantly, it handles those reveals/twists without feeling cheap, or like a far-fetched deus ex machina. Once the cards are laid out on the table, a lot of previous sequences and character beats click into place. It’s easy to see how things were able to work out, without straining credulity or making you feel dumb for missing something. In this way, it’s smartly written, making use of the familiar to throw you for a loop.

Timothy Busfield, the Emmy-winning actor known for “The West Wing” and “Thirtysomething,” has secured a legal victory in his child sex abuse case.

A New Mexico judge on Tuesday sided with Busfield, announcing he will release him on his own recognizance as the 68-year-old actor-director awaits trial stemming from allegations he sexually abused two child actors on the set of the Fox drama “The Cleaning Lady.” His wife, “Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Gilbert, was in attendance at Tuesday’s hearing and wept following the decision.

“Thank you, God,” she appeared to say.

New Mexico District Court Judge David A. Murphy said the child sex abuse allegations against Busfield are “inherently dangerous” and that prosecutors proved “Mr. Busfield does pose a danger to the safety of others” but that it is currently “difficult for the court to put too much weight into the allegations as they’ve not been vetted by the judicial system.”

Leading up to his decision, Murphy cited letters submitted by Busfield’s defense team from the actor’s friends and family, additional affidavits in support of the actor and “the lack of a pattern involving children in this case.”

“I don’t find that there’s been sufficient presentation that this defendant may commit new crimes pending trial. There’s not evidence of a pattern of criminal conduct,” Murphy added. “There are no similar allegations involving children in his past. There’s no evidence of noncompliance with prior court orders.”

Though Busfield will be supervised by a pretrial services officer in Albuquerque, his travel will not be limited and he is required to report to that officer. He is barred from possessing firearms and weapons and from consuming alcohol or drugs. He is also ordered to refrain from contacting the alleged victims and their family and from discussing his case with witnesses.

Busfield had been jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque, where he was booked on two felony counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor and a single count of child abuse. He turned himself into law enforcement last week, days after New Mexico officials issued a warrant for his arrest.

An affidavit filed earlier this month accuses Busfield of inappropriately touching two child actors, who are brothers, during his tenure as a director, actor and producer for “The Cleaning Lady.” According to the complaint, one child actor said Busfield first touched his “private areas” multiple times on set when he was 7 years old. The actor said that, when he was 8 years old, Busfield touched him inappropriately again several times, according to the affidavit. The complaint also detailed a police interview with Busfield in which he suggested that the boys’ mother might have sought “revenge” on the director for “not bringing her kids back for the final season.”

Leading up to his surrender, Busfield denied the allegations. “They’re all lies, and I did not do anything to those little boys,” he said in a video published last week by TMZ. He also told supporters at the time he intends to “fight” the charges and predicted, “I’m gonna be exonerated.”

Tuesday’s hearing featured statements by Bernalillo County Deputy Dist. Atty. Savannah Brandenburg-Koch, Busfield defense attorney Amber Fayerberg and testimony from “Cleaning Lady” cinematographer Alan Caudillo.

Although Brandenburg-Koch argued against Busfield’s release and cited previous allegations that he assaulted two women, his attorney presented audio from the child actors’ initial interviews with police in which they said that Busfield did not touch them inappropriately.

“This was not a failure to disclose,” Fayerberg said of the audio clips, which she played in the courtroom. “This was an express denial.”

Fayerberg also mentioned the legal troubles of the child actors’ parents, including father Ronald Rodis’ guilty plea to a federal fraud charge in 2017, and a fraud lawsuit in 2011 against the boys’ mother, Angele LaSalle. The attorney said the two young actors had been “victimized” but not by Busfield.

“They were victimized by their own parents, who no longer could make money as a lawyer, disbarred. No longer could write bad checks,” she said, “taking 85% of the money they made on a TV show and then manufactured into victims as revenge.”

Busfield’s professional career has taken numerous hits amid the child sex abuse allegations. As the complaint circulated, Busfield was dropped by his agency and edited out of an upcoming film, according to Deadline. Last week, NBC also decided to pull an episode of “Law & Order: SVU” featuring Busfield from its programming lineup.

A man has 90 minutes to prove his innocence during an AI-expedited murder trial in Mercy, a slick new sci-fi thriller from director Timur Bekmambetov (in his first Hollywood outing since 2016’s Ben-Hur) premiering in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. The premise instantly draws us in, and solid execution maintains our interest for the majority of the movie, but a third act implosion sinks the whole enterprise and makes us question our own good taste for enjoying it in the first place.

In an era where most of us interact with artificial intelligence on a daily basis, we walk into these kinds of things with certain expectations. Mercy‘s painfully outdated interpretation of AI feels less like The Creator, Ex Machina or even M3GAN and more like 90s thriller Virtuosity: by the time Rebecca Ferguson‘s algorithm praises Chris Pratt‘s “gut instincts” and shares a meaningful nod, it has severed any sense of technological realism.

Mercy stars Pratt as L.A. police detective Chris Raven, who helped advocate for the titular technology: an AI-powered criminal justice system that serves as judge, jury, and executioner, and gives defendants 90 minutes to plead their cases before an AI judge delivers a verdict and carries out the sentence. Death sentences are instantly delivered through lethal injection, conveniently located in the chair on which defendants are restrained.

But it’s not all bad: the Mercy system bypasses any need for warrants, and gives both the AI judge and the defendant access to phone records, traffic cameras, police databases, and any other kind of evidence that could possibly be available in the cloud. Defendants should have everything they need to prove their case—save for a lawyer—but the all-knowing algorithm should already know whether or not they’re guilty.

That puts Raven in a bind when he wakes up from a hangover and a head injury before the digital Judge Maddox (Ferguson), who tells him his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) has been murdered and there’s a 97.5 percent chance that he’s the killer. Raven can’t quite remember what transpired, but he knows he isn’t a murderer, and has exactly 90 minutes to get his guilt rating below 92 percent, or else he’ll be executed on the spot.

This is essentially The Fugitive, except Raven isn’t trying to prove his innocence and track down the real murderer while he’s on the run: he’s doing it all while restrained to a chair in a darkened room. Good thing he’s an actual detective, unlike the homeless men he’s put in front of the Mercy system in the past.

The setup immediately draws us in, and director Bekmambetov does a great job of ratcheting up the tension as Raven scrambles to not only save his own life, but solve his wife’s murder. As he scrambles to untangle the mystery before the clock runs out, he calls AA sponsor Robert Nelson (Chris Sullivan), daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers), and partner Jaq (Kali Reis) to help him put the pieces of the puzzle together.

All Mercy needs is a sensible resolution to succeed in B-movie terms. Maybe Raven finds the real killer, and succeeds in proving his innocence before the Mercy system. Maybe the killer gets away, and Raven’s execution becomes the impetus to bring the whole system down. Or maybe Raven really is the killer—and his inside knowledge allows him to game the system and get away.

After 75 minutes of an interesting and well-executed sci-fi murder mystery-cum-courtroom drama, any reasonable resolution would seal the deal. But instead, the utter nonsense delivered in the final act of writer Marco van Belle’s script sends this whole movie off the rails.

Key test in these kinds of credulity-testing whodunnits: walk back the events of the narrative from the point of view of the killer. What Mercy asks us to believe has transpired is not only completely baffling, but it also forces the film to completely switch gears, abandoning the premise that made it interesting in the first place.

Still, Mercy has enough technical polish to keep it watchable, buoyed by Ramin Djawadi’s propulsive score, sleek cinematography from Khalid Mohtaseb, and proficient VFX work (love that police dronecopter). Bekmambetov stages the action well, and both Pratt and Ferguson give fun performances that lean into the script’s silliness—even if Maddox is written with far too much empathy to convincingly register as artificial intelligence.

In the end, Mercy is a thriller that builds a smart, timely hook and sustains it for just long enough to make its collapse especially frustrating. The film asks provocative questions about truth and justice in the AI age of only to abandon them in favor of a finale that doesn’t withstand even minimal scrutiny. It’s a cautionary tale about blind faith in algorithms—a lesson that could have also benefitted the filmmakers.