The Rip is the latest film to explore what is fast becoming a stronghold in the American popular consciousness: the suburban trap house. Written and directed by Joe Carnahan, its plotting is excellent, its pacing not so much, and this is presumably because of the growing constrictions of the Netflix model. Before the film was released, Matt Damon commented on the Netflix requirement to reiterate the plot periodically in case viewers are on their phones, and that plays out here as a disposable expository-kinetic first and third act that sandwich an excellent slow-burn second act. This second act should have been the entire film, and sees a group of Miami cops, played by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Stephen Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Sasha Calle and Catalina Sandino Moreno, dispatched to a dope house in Hialeah that turns out to contain a much greater windfall than any of them could have imagined. The opening is a reheated, half-baked, tedious exercise in cop bluster, set to the pounding of an incongruous car race outside of police headquarters, while the third act plays like a C-grade chase sequence from the early 2000s, little more than a series of hyperkinetic incentives for viewers to look up from their phones. The second act, however, has some amazing moments, and is where Carnahan’s original vision really shines through.

This second act provides an explanation for the intractability of the trap house in the contemporary American psyche, as the point at which the precarity of police and the precarity of the drug trade come together, “the sandbag between chaos and civilized society.” No sooner do they find the Hialeah house’s enormous haul – twenty million – than the cops are forced to question whether their tipoff has come from someone in the cartel or a corrupt member of the police department. A tight chamber drama ensues, since the protocol requires the team to count the “rip” on the spot, and Damon’s character, paranoid about the possibility of corruption or contamination, insists on confiscating everyone’s phone, creating a communicative bubble from the outside world. Within that hothouse environment, the rip both intensifies the chain of command and the ways it might be thwarted, leading each character into their own private speculations on what they might do with the money outside of their institutional obligations. Most of them invoke medical expenses, legal expenses, funeral expenses and the day-to-day travails of American life.

At the core of this second act is the most inspired part of the film, the point where it glimpses greatness – Carnahan’s extension of the chamber drama to the cul-de-sac outside the trap house. The moment the agents step into this space, they’re greeted with an eerie quietness, a prescient hush, and a sense of something terrifying just below the threshold of suburban consciousness. It’s prefigured when an ambigious carload of local Hialeah cops arrive and then back off into the night, their intentions and relationships with Miami command unclear. However, it peaks when Affleck’s character notes the houselights of the cul-de-sac going on sequentially, one after another, before one of them starts to blink out a message in morse code. No sooner does he wonders “Where are the people? Where are the cars?” than he realises that the cartel must have bought out the entire suburban block around the cul-de-sac, producing a wonderfully uncanny defamiliarisation of the “normal” urban texture outside the trap house, along with a further blurring of boundaries, as the agency that has brought them to this location is shrouded even deeper in mystery. This shifts the film into a horror register, as if the dope house were a supernatural threshold, projecting the cops off grid, and culminating with Affleck’s character tracking his way through the morse code house and finding a TV playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Unfortunately this exquisite suspense entirely dissipates during the third act, whose action is uninspired and whose emotional beats are too signposted, inorganic, algorithmic; the film ends with a bland exchange between Affleck and Damon as they watch the sunrise over a Miami beach: “Great work today man.” “You too.” Yet Affleck and Damon’s rapport transcends the necessities of the Netflix model, especially during the early part of the film, when they’re distrustful of each other (although there is a poetic inevitability to the two of them rejoining at the end, as Damon reveals that he had to make Affleck think he was corrupt or nobody else would). Beyond a certain point, Affleck and Damon’s characters become immaterial, since they are riffing on themselves, their screen persona, their natural rapport, which means that an emotional intensity emerges despite the half-baked conclusion. For both Affleck and Damon look tired, and their exhaustion opens up an emotionally authentic sense of the late cinematic world, framed here as the late stages of a police career: “I’ve been waking up at night thinking about time – how much has passed, how much I got left.” And while Damon’s tragic backstory feels arbitrarily shoehorned in, the fact that he is “never truly going to recover,” has nothing left to lose, feels real, if not as a facet of his character, then as part of the film’s low-key elegy for these Last Movie Stars.