Home Cinema Review - Dragged Across Concrete (18)

This is a bad idea. It's bad for you and it's bad for me. It's bad like lasagna in a can.

The Gist: Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn are Brett Ridgeman and Anthony Lurasetti, partnered cops whose hands-on brand of law enforcement in the town of Bulwark lands them in serious trouble with their captain. Newly released con Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) is contemplating a return to crime with old pal Biscuit (Michael Jai White) in order to support his problem-fraught family. The courses of action taken by all four men to remedy their situations - plus the activities in Bulwark of a deeply sinister criminal gang - threaten to converge in fashion as brutal as the film's title suggests.

The Juice: This third feature of writer/director S. Craig Zahler is set within a similarly macho genre as his other work to date. 2015's Bone Tomahawk was the most shocking western you're ever likely to see, while his 2017 prison movie Brawl in Cell Block 99 cemented his reputation as a maker of '70s-style guy-movies with intelligence to match their occasional, bone-splintering violence. So from cement to Concrete... Here we have the film-maker's longest slow-burn movie to date, and its fuse fizzes all the way to events that are suitably destructive (but more toe-curling than cathartic). 

As a director Zahler likes to properly hang out in each location, his frequently motionless but always observant camera letting the story unfold unhurried but tense, no need for recourse to an original score. (The only music in the film is a series of soul tracks penned by Zahler himself - the guy really does do everything.) His screen-writing preference is for lengthy dialogue-driven scenes that work because they're so painstakingly crafted, the words fleshing out both his characters and the morally grey world in which they exist. Tarantino comparisons might be made, but the chat here is drier in its humour and more sombre in its tone. While the wordplay is ultimately just as stylised, it give a greater sense of a real world over a movie one and the violence - when it comes - can't be so easily shrugged off as a result. Quite the reverse.

As for the story's dealings with police corruption and racial politics, that seems particularly relevant and more than a little provocative one year on from the movie's release. The ageing Ridgeman's actions in his apprehension of a Latino suspect reflect one of 2020's most contentious news stories and both Gibson and Vaughn make for problem protagonists, however fascinating. (Mel is tough-shelled and cynical, Vince does a line in well-honed witty comebacks - both have attitudes to make the liberal-oriented viewer cringe.) Kittles is more sympathetic as jailbird Henry, but everyone here is mired in one murky, discomfiting world; you might come out of it feeling more grimy than entertained. And at least one moment will shock your pants clean off.

The Judgement: 8/10. Don't mistake me - Dragged Across Concrete is a compelling piece of cinema, as impressive in the stark composition of its scenes as it is in its writing. Full of the same driven masculine behaviour as the films of Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegal (two of Zahler's self-confessed influences), it plunges its characters into even deeper moral ambiguity and lets the audience work out what the right choices were. It'll make you squirm, it'll make you shudder, occasionally it'll force a grim smile. And it'll have you wrestling with some tough questions - without giving you anything close to an answer. Keep the title in mind and brace yourself.