Review: Dragged Across Concrete Is an Uncanny Shot of Pulp Fiction

With Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and now Dragged Across Concrete, writer-director S. Craig Zahler has refined a highly particular style of pulp that runs both hot and cold. The tone is communicated up front by the films’ titles, which are garish and plainspoken, as if to say that operatically bad shit happens as a matter of course.

That’s the attitude that Zahler’s characters adopt as well, as they tend to face atrocity with the air of people who derive their strength from low expectations. Violence erupts in Zahler’s films with an offhand suddenness that’s often authentically shocking, which is heightened by a variety of formalist contradictions. Zahler pays intricate attention to deliberately crummy, vague, “universal” settings, and invests stereotypical characters with behavioral curlicues that render them just human enough so that their deaths sting. Zahler’s scenarios are deliberately absurd, yet he pumps them up with all sorts of odd, nearly docudramatic details, and this mixture of the banal and the hyper-specific imbues his films with an element of the uncanny.

Following a bruiser as he killed his way toward the inner sanctum of a surreally hellish prison, Brawl in Cell Block 99 was pointedly unpolitical—implying, in a macho manner typical of revenge films—that politics are a luxury for those who’re insulated from the “real world” of killed-or-be-killed. Which is to say that this apolitical texture is actually reactionary, suggesting, via omission, the essential futility of liberal humanist ideals. Dragged Across Concrete renders this idea much more explicit. The film’s theme is articulated when the poor and multiple sclerosis-plagued Melanie Ridgeman (Laurie Holden) says that she’s as liberal as an ex-cop can be, and that she never thought she was racist until she moved into her current neighborhood, which is low-income and rife with juvenile delinquents of color, who’re shown, in a reductive scene, to harass Melanie’s daughter.

The various cops and criminals of Dragged Across Concrete, white as well as of color, take the fraudulence of liberal beliefs as a given, writing them off as fantasies indulged by a populace that’s prosperous enough to evade their ramifications. (This theme is in the air right now, also driving Jordan Peele’s Us.) The film’s plot kicks into gear when Melanie’s husband, Detective Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson), and his partner, Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), are suspended for exerting excessive force while arresting a Hispanic drug dealer, which a civilian films on a phone. Zahler acknowledges the detectives’ cruelty, while, per the dictates of the crime genre, also allowing us to revel in their bitterness and power.

This have-it-both-ways quality is another of Zahler’s provocations, as he’s explicitly saying that we come to these sorts of films to see the rough and cathartic exertion of force, and in spite of whether we think that force jibes with our real-world ideals. Zahler is right. The cruelty of his films, which is laced with a biting wit, has a way of clearing pop-cultural air that’s often inhabited by preachy think pieces and well-meaning Oscar bait, or even by genre films that nevertheless feel the need to solicit approval via a redemptive theme. Zahler heads for the gutter instead, asking us to empathize with characters who refute our idealisms.

After subduing the drug dealer, Ridgeman torments the dealer’s sexual partner, Rosalinda (Liannet Borrego), by showering her with cold water and forcing her to stand in a bedroom in her underwear while they question her. This footage isn’t filmed by other parties, so the extent of Ridgeman and Tony’s vigilante tactics are unknown by the public, prompting us to wonder what else they’ve gotten away with over the years. Yet they feel cheated for being suspended—feelings which their superior, Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson), casually shares. Such scenes elucidate the thorny specificity of Zahler’s vision while deliberately screwing with our moral compass. Ridgeman and Tony’s treatment of Rosalinda is disgusting and Zahler sensitively dramatizes her humiliation. So are the racist jokes the cops exchange with Calvert, though the actors’ performances and Zahler’s dialogue and staging are kinetically snappy. Zahler recreates that discombobulating split in sympathies you may have when someone you like says they voted for Trump, or rues the days of comparatively less fettered police brutality.

Yet there’s also a sense that Zahler is outside of Ridgeman and Tony’s self-pity; one suspects that politics mostly matter to the filmmaker in terms of aesthetic. If he’s nostalgic for the good old days, presumably before our culture grew so “politically correct,” that nostalgia is primarily directed toward genre films. Zahler is fighting for art’s right to be offensive and disreputable, voicing sentiments that are shared by many people in this country which cannot, and should not, be aired without scrutiny. He grooves on straight talk, however nasty, fashioning crime thrillers that force even liberal audiences to confront their inner fascists.

Zahler particularly appears to miss the days when violent Mel Gibson vehicles were relevant, and he concocts a role for Gibson that weds the actor’s own prejudices and controversies with his masochistic “Mad Mel” persona—two sides that were always closely intertwined anyway. Gibson rises to the occasion with a tightly coiled performance that’s so unapologetically closed-off that it’s deeply and disturbingly poignant, bringing to mind the conflicted range of emotions that’s elicited by John Wayne’s performance in The Searchers. Ridgeman’s feelings of being put out to pasture are aligned with Gibson’s stint in movie jail after recordings of his abusive rants at his wife were released. It’s no accidental coincidence that recordings destroy Ridgeman not once but twice over the course of Dragged Across Concrete.

Ridgeman is the film’s central avatar of rage—an embodiment of working-class American discontent that Zahler reveals to be shared by characters of varying colors, genders, and social statuses, most notably Henry (Tory Kittles), an African-American ex-con with limited options, with whom Ridgeman forges an uneasy alliance. Tellingly, given the aversion of Dragged Across Concrete to left-wing politeness, their emotional epiphany springs from their mutual willingness to call one another, and to each be called, the n-word.

Zahler takes a standard action-movie scenario—in which crooked cops try to rob drug dealers—and stretches it out to an epic, ultraviolent, and comic study of the petty, often working-class-centric nonsense that stymies people on a daily basis. When Henry rousts his mother’s john out of the house, Zahler lingers on the man as he fumbles with the locks on the door. Following Ridgeman and Tony as they tail a requisitely heartless Eurotrash killer, Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann), Zahler fashions an elaborate and ingenious set piece that alternates between two cars’ worth of men talking strategy. When a struggling mother, Kelly (Jennifer Carpenter), returns to work at a bank after a prolonged maternal leave, Zahler devotes a lengthy, weirdly touching and funny moment to the speech her verbose boss, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed), gives for the occasion. And this scene only intensifies the pain of what follows, which Zahler foreshadows with a masterful composition where we see a van of killers pass Kelly in the reflection of a window as she checks her make-up.

Dragged Across Concrete is a lurid ode to detail—to the professionalism that Zahler questionably admires in Ridgeman and Tony. (His lack of sentimentality, in the tradition of pulp writing, is ironically quite sentimental.) The film’s settings, like those of Brawl in Cell Block 99, are drab and anonymous, though Zahler shoots them with an exhilaratingly pared-down sense of purpose, with sharp physical details that complement the unexpected narrative flourishes. These backdrops suggest every place and no place at once, and are rendered with hard lighting and symmetrical framing that recalls the glory days of John Carpenter. The film’s dialogue is terse, intelligent, yet often somehow un-showy, suggesting the flip and funny things people often say while at work, which are rarely captured in cinema. These qualities cohabitate with a deliberately nasty vision of America—a union that Zahler embraces for its intense and suggestive social tension. He’s already a master of the pulp film, and with Dragged Across Concrete he doubles down on its best and worst elements.