I had two reasons that got me out of home to go and see this movie directed by S. Craig Zahler, a director whose previous films (low cost action, so-called B movies) I have not seen. The first was the title – ‘Dragged Across Concrete‘. I told to myself that a movie with such an awful title has the potential to hide something special. The other was the lead role actor, Mel Gibson, one of the famous and controversial characters in the world of cinema, independent-minded (working systematically outside of the big American studios) but also possessing a negative public image that includes alleged violent misdemeanors and even racist episodes. The choice of S. Craig Zahler, who also wrote the script, is so good that I can only suspect that the story and the role have been created with Gibson in mind.
Mel Gibson is making the best of his successful casting, creating one of the best of his roles that I remember. His hero, the police officer Brett Ridgeman is approaching the age of 60 years, and the integrity combined with ‘unconventional’ law enforcement methods succeeded just to get him stuck in the same position for more than 30 years, while his former partner, who probably had the guts to accept compromises, gives him orders from his comfortable office. Ridgeman / Gibson seems to be enjoying the cop work with his younger partner, Tony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn, excellent casting also), but home troubles are gathering (a multi-racial neighborhood with many problems, an adolescent daughter who is aggressed on the road from school to home, a former cop wife who is sick), and the suspension following an incident in which the two partners used ‘excessive force’ does not help. The road to crime is tempting, but like in many other movies, it will prove to be dangerous. Director S. Craig Zahler uses not only Gibson’s talent as actor, but also Gibson’s public figure, distributing him as a maybe-bad-guy, a man with material problems and under constant pressure because of the profession, whose attitudes and actions can be sometimes interpreted as racist. There is no clear stand taken or excuse made in the film for this, just the description of some characters and situations that exist. And this description is made with much cinematic talent. Each scene, each situation is described in detail and in depth, has visual and action logic, whether it is in a modest apartment or in a gorgeous villa, in a parked garage or in a bank, in the light of the day or in the semi-darkness of the night. S. Craig Zahler proves talent in describing various social environments, credibly bringing to screen different micro-universes such as the world of policemen or of the African Americans in needy neighborhoods, or building the relationship between the two policemen.
The film contains several scenes of violence close to sordid, which probably provoked the envy of Quentin Tarantino, but I think the director did well (from a cinematographic point of view) refusing to cut them out in order to create a shorter version for broader distribution in cinema theaters. It’s definitely a sordid story about a handful of men from different social backgrounds (it’s worth mentioning here also the character of Henry, a young Afro-American man just out of prison, also played very well by Tory Kittles) who resort to various kinds of crimes to evade the situations without any perspective that the society placed them in. A few days ago I saw ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ directed by Marielle Heller. Two seemingly very different films, one is a biopics written by a woman with a woman engaged in literary forgeries as the main heroine, the other directed by a man is about men engaged in violent crimes. Both films, however, share the type of characters who, in a different world, or perhaps in other times or in another social context, with some chance, could have been positive characters and normative citizens. The circumstances and the cruel world they (we) live in are pushing all of them toward crime, of course with very different degrees of gravity and eventually with very different implications. ‘Dragged Across Concrete‘ is not a movie that will please everybody, but viewers who do not shy away from violence (not free violence!) on screen and from films almost two and a half hours long (without giving however the impression that they are extended in time without reason) will have the satisfaction of watching a solid, interesting, well-acted film.