Movie Review: Dragged Across Concrete

Dragged Across Concrete **** / *****

Directed by: S. Craig Zahler.

Written by: S. Craig Zahler.

Starring: Mel Gibson (Brett Ridgeman), Vince Vaughn (Anthony Lurasetti), Tory Kittles (Henry Johns), Michael Jai White (Biscuit), Thomas Kretschmann (Lorentz Vogelmann), Jennifer Carpenter (Kelly Summer), Laurie Holden (Melanie Ridgeman), Don Johnson (Chief Lt. Calvert), Udo Kier (Friedrich), Fred Melamed (Mr. Edmington), Justine Warrington (Cheryl), Matthew MacCaull (Grey Gloves), Primo Allon (Black Gloves), Jordyn Ashley Olson (Sara Ridgeman), Myles Truitt (Ethan Jones), Tattiawna Jones (Denise), Richard Newman (Feinbaum), Vivian Ng (Lana), Andrew Dunbar (Jeffrey), Noel (Vasquez).

 

There’s a scene early in S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete in which the director seems to be daring his critics to get offended. In it, two white copes – played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn – are questioning a young Latino woman who wears hearing aids – and although her English is perfectly clear to those of us in the audience – you don’t even have to strain to make out the words – the two cops act as if they cannot understand a word she is saying. It is an admittedly juvenile provocation by Zahler – a way to clap back at his critics, who he knows are out there, and he knows he’s going to offend, and he doesn’t much care. You would think just casting Mel Gibson in the lead role would be enough of a sign that Zahler doesn’t care about offending people – but just in case you someone wandered in and didn’t know, Zahler makes sure you know right off the bat. And yet, that scene isn’t really indicative of the rest of the movie. The films racial politics – and gender politics for that matter – are more complicated than you would think a movie with that opening scene would be. Zahler has created a world here in which the cops are racist – at least a little – but they are also family men. They will cross the line into becoming criminals – yet they aren’t the worst criminals in the film. The two major black characters in the movie are criminals as well – but again, they aren’t the worst of the worst. They seemed trapped between the cops who are out to bust them, and the real criminals who exploit them. It’s a film that basically stops for 15 minutes at its mid-point, to tell the story of a bank employee on her first day going back to work after giving birth, just so that when a robbery happens at her bank at the end of that sequence, you care about her in a way you don’t about bank employees in robbery scenes. Dragged Across Concrete is a complicated moral landscape, where no one is innocent.

 

Like Zahler’s other two films – the violent horror/Western Bone Tomahawk and the crime drama Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete is far longer than you would expect a genre film like this to be. It isn’t quite as extended as Brawl in Cell Block 99 was – which I liked to describe as a movie called Brawl in Cell Block 99 which takes two hours to even get to Cell Block 99 and another 20 minutes before the brawl breaks out. When it gets there though, watch out. Both of them films have already developed a cult following – and Dragged Across Concrete will as well. This film can be neatly divided in two – with everything leading up to that robbery at the midpoint happening over a few days, and then everything after that robbery happening over one long night. The film will get violent – very violent – although not as much as his other two.

 

Gibson and Vaughn star as two detective – Ridgeman and Lurasetti. Ridgeman is old – he’s approaching 60 – and he hasn’t been promoted in decades – he says because he refuses to play the political games, which is assholes says to excuse their asshole behavior. Ridgeman is tired – he has a sick wife, and a teenage daughter who gets harassed daily, all because he cannot afford to live in a better neighborhood. Lurasetti seems cheerier than his older partner – if no less of an asshole. He speaks like no cop (or really, no person) has ever spoken – with the weird cadence of Zahler’s dialogue. Vaughn probably says more in the opening scene here than he did throughout all of Brawl in Cell Block 99 (which is the best performance of his career). The two cops get suspended for being too rough on a suspect – which of course, was captured on a cellphone. With more time on his hands, Ridgeman becomes determined to rip off a criminal – why should they have money, when he doesn’t. Which will lead, inevitably, to that bank robbery. The other storyline, that gets much less time, follows Henry (Tory Kittles), a young black man just out of prison, who wants to find the money to support his mom, and his little brother – confined to a wheelchair because of a stray bullet. He too, will of course, end up at that robbery.

 

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the difference between depiction and endorsement – and its often in the oddest movies (like The Wolf of Wall Street, which clearly thought its main characters were trash, even as it had fun with them). Here, Zahler seems to be deliberately walking the line between the two of them. He doesn’t try and hide the fact that his cops are racist – at least a little – or sexist. They express their disappointment in the modern PC world, and complain it gets in their way. Does Zahler agree – or is it just his characters bullshitting? Casting Gibson is a deliberate provocation in and of itself – but Zahler gives him the best role he’s had in years, and Gibson delivers one of his best all time performances. It would have been smart casting even if Gibson had not exposed himself to be racist in past incidents, as this is the inevitable end of the road for so many of his characters from prior films – burnt out and bitter, his shtick that was once so charming no turned sad and pathetic. This may just be the saddest Gibson has ever been in a film.

 

Yes, the film seems to deliberately want to provoke a reaction from you – whether it needles you with some dialogue that could reasonably be called racist, sometimes in serious scenes, sometimes in jokey ones (like Vaughn saying he cannot be racist because he orders dark roast on Martin Luther King Day). But then it gives Vaughn a black girlfriend, who he clearly loves, and who clearly loves him. Does that mean he cannot be racist? Of course not. But I do think some of it implies that what we see isn’t all we get.

 

More than anything, Dragged Across Concrete is a character piece. You will have to decide what to make of its characters, and whether it means anything larger. In a way, the film reminded me a little bit of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (which is perhaps just because I’ve been thinking of that film a lot since Under the Silver Lake). That film basically took Philip Marlowe, a man with a moral code, with plopped him in a word where no one had one of those anymore. That’s kind of what Dragged Across Concrete does – pulls a bunch of characters that would have looked completely normal in a cop movie from a couple of decades ago, and plopped them into a world with PC culture and cell phones. The results aren’t pretty.