When he's stopped unexpectedly by local Police they use the drug connection to seize all the cash despite not actually arresting him: an entirely legal seizure which he can contest in court but at great cost and delay.
With this meaning Mike will be jailed Terry goes to the local Police Chief (Don Johnson) to plead for the return of at least some of the cash.
No good will come of this.
Netflix is stuffed with third tier action movies and this looks like it should be yet another but Jeremy Saulnier has pulled together an absurdly tense and grounded story of corruption that had it any big names in could have had quite an impact. It's like a season of the Jack Reacher TV show squished down into a couple of hours.
There's a slow escalation of stakes and absolutely masses of stuff happens in a way so many things mess up by meandering about and simply don't cover the same ground. It's quite a trick, at the hour mark I was wondering how on earth it was going to resolve everything thinking it had been running longer than it had because so much was packed in.
It does get a bit exposition heavy around details of the conspiracy that landed Terry's cousin in jail but that it manages this as well as having multiple standoffs and action scenes is testament to the lack of flab.
Aaron Pierre is quite a presence. He is of course playing an ultimate badass, it's the law in a movie like this, but he's also just trying to leave town or de-escalate at multiple points in interesting ways and not all the local Police are MAGA/redneck stereotypes. Even in the climactic gunfight there's a couple of people going "fuck this it needs to stop it's, obviously wrong" and it getting all messy as a result. The ending is sudden, only kind of positive and very much only there because people other than the protagonist do the right thing.
Highly recommended for a very grounded action movie 8/10.