Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Dragged Across Concrete is writer-director S. Craig Zahler’s further exploration of the seamy underbelly of American society, particularly through the prism of how that experience causes ripple effects that throw even innocent people into the wake of the criminals.  Most of the action follows the exploits of two cops in the fictional city of Bulwark, the older burnout Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and his younger partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), who get suspended from the force after they are caught on camera going a little too far in roughing up a suspect in the current environment that frowns on the perception of racial profiling. The other major story arc in the film involves Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), just released from prison, going back to a life of crime in order to provide for his mother (a drug user who has been prostituting herself for needed cash) and his disabled younger brother, who has aspirations of becoming a video game developer. The two stories converge when the cops decide they’re going to snatch money from a secretive drug dealer named Vogelmann, while Henry, working for that guy, becomes the wheel-man in a bank heist.

Money, of course, is the root of the evil that men do, and even those that want that money for a good cause, such as helping their family, have to do some unsavory things in order to hope for a better day down the road for those they care about.  Brett has his self-made issues as a bigot and a burnout, but also a wife suffering with multiple sclerosis and a teenage daughter being bullied around the lower-class neighborhood (the only one he can afford now that his wife can’t easily work), and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep them from becoming another helpless statistic.  Anthony is on the verge of proposing to his beloved girlfriend, though the timing of the suspension and his need to be secretive about his plans with Brett further shakes his belief that she might say yes when the question is popped.

Zahler is a deliberate film-maker who takes his time to get through scenes, allowing the dialogue all of the pauses and beats necessary to draw out the personality of his characters, while also allowing viewers the time to fully envelop themselves into the wit and wisdom, or even the inanity, of the words as they’re uttered.  As such, the run time for his films have gone over the two-hour mark, and Dragged Across Concrete clocks in at an epic length of 159 minutes, despite very few set pieces to boast.  Could it have been shorter?  Sure, especially in side story characters, such as following Jennifer Carpenter’s new mother who has a severe phobia of returning back to work from an extended maternity leave.  The inclusion of this story serves on purpose, and not a necessary one, except as a means for Zahler to play with the audience in a way that not everyone will appreciate.  Much of the film involves the cops performing surveillance, which doesn’t technically push the plot forward to any large degree, but the dialogue is sharp enough, and the idiosyncratic banter but often banal between Vaughn and Gibson fresh enough, that those elements provide many of the film’s pleasures.

There are so many refreshing qualities to Zahler’s approach, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the fact that his films are inherently uneven.  It’s a bit of an irony for someone coming to films as a novelist that his approach to story-telling is in need of an editor, not only in terms of extraneous characters or conversations, but also in how long he expends time in exploring some facet that strikes his fancy that has little perceptible pay-off either narratively or thematically.  When Zahler does cut loose, the one thing you can be assured of is that the violence will be quite brutal and shocking. A lifelong fan of gory b-grade horror flicks, the director revels in the viscera of his kills, some of which gets so bloody and carnal that they could almost double for footage of surgical procedures. Where other film-makers would pull away from the grisly nature of the violence enacted, Zahler zooms in to show you the details, though sometimes to graphic that go far beyond being realistic anymore.  That clinical approach extends toward the bare essentials cinematography from Zahler associate Benji Bakshi, who makes a modest $15 million picture look like it cost five times that amount.

It’s a film that puts us in an unenviable position of rooting for people who are not good themselves, mostly because their enemies are so vile, and their motives are beyond personal greed.  It’s a predatory world, where the only line of defense for the lawful doves are those who are color outside the lines of the law in order to try to make things right again by a code.  Trust doesn’t come easy, but in the end, we learn, sometimes one has to trust that there is honor enough among thieves that make the difference for those they’re stealing to protect. All of the characters have to face decisions, and we see and hear them talk them all out, and they make those decisions in ways that are often ill-timed or ill-informed, resulting in situations that either worsen their current conditions, even when they’ve been tested by hammering them out logically.

Though Vaughn and Gibson have had their ups and downs, Dragged across concrete represents some of the best recent work for the two actors, who still retain a likability beyond the actions of their characters that will likely cause some conflicts, especially among people who dislike Gibson’s personal conduct over the years independent of his film work.  Regardless, they are fantastic actors when they want to be, and they seem to want to be here. Tory Kittles is also arresting as the third-wheel in this ramshackle narrative, and represents the closest thing to having someone to truly root for as a person who must do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right, even though society perpetually will paint him as a career criminal and punish him into becoming one by limiting all of his options once he’s served his time.

Many have tried to draw their own political reads on Zahler’s films, partially because of some of the racial dynamics among the characters he’s written, partially because of the actors he has cast (Mel Gibson triggers this most), but Zahler has maintained the worlds he creates are apolitical even if some of this characters have a certain point of view.  In his world, the correctness of everyone’s politics begin to stop mattering once the reality of the threat ends up at your door, where you’re forced to kill or be killed from others who see you as an obstacle to whatever they really want.  It’s then that idealism stop and realism starts for the characters, at least until it get to a point where even the realism starts, and Zahler’s brand of ultra-brutal savagery starts, with blood and viscera pouring onto the screen in a completely matter-of-fact fashion that is both visually shocking and emotionally sterile at the same time. Perhaps the only other film-maker who would delve this far into the graphic violence within every-day society is, coincidentally, Mel Gibson himself.  Other may try to label, but Zahler doesn’t care, because a fiction in which the world is full of noble white hats and black hats who always get their comeuppance in the end doesn’t jibe with the real world around us, which isn’t caring, logical, or motivated by political correctness, with idealism corrupted by self-enrichment and/or self-preservation.

You may disapprove of this, of course, especially if you think that fiction should try to ultimately uphold the political and moral ideals of its viewers, but it’s not what Zahler is interested in, and he seems content with giving people what he wants, rather than what they want. He’s more interested in the minutia that governs our lives than in providing big-picture grandstanding to make overt political points.  By the end, we’re put into a position of having to hope for the best for grey hats who are flawed, corrupt, or amoral, which may make for an uncomfortable experience for those who want a belief that this world still has its unsullied heroes out there to always save the day. Criminals are flawed, of course, but so are the protectors, and the best we can hope for is for their fight to not spill over into our front doors.  We may wish for a world in which everyone’s trying to keep on the up and up, but in Dragged Across Concrete‘s Bulwark, everyone’s just flailing desperately to keep from sinking further down.

Qwipster’s rating: B

MPAA Rated: R for strong violence, grisly images, language, and some sexuality/nudity.
Running time: 159 min.

Cast: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Laurie Holden, Michael Jai White, Thomas Kretschmann, Tattiawna Jones, Jennifer Carpenter,  Jordyn Ashley Olson
Small role: Don Johnson, Fred Melamed
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Screenplay: S. Craig Zahler