In short: Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Having been filmed applying a lot of foot to a drug dealer’s head, veteran – the sort of veteran without any chance of promotion, really – cop Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and his somewhat younger partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), are suspended for six weeks (which seems to put the film into the realm of total fantasy, but hey). This does hit both of them financially quite hard, and Brett, with a wife suffering from MS and a daughter who seems to be a favourite object of bullying and assault in the predominantly black and poor neighbourhood the family live in, decides he is owed more than what he’s getting from life, so why not try and steal some drug money?

At the same time, the film also looks in on small time criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), who has just come out of jail, with little prospect of taking care of his wheelchair-bound son or his own junkie mother who has started turning tricks to survive. The only way for Henry and his family to stay afloat will be a return to the criminal life.

Both of these plotlines will converge in a violent bank robbery and the following grab for the loot.

I’ve seen various reviews tut-tutting at S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete for being some kind of Conservative (which appears to be the word Americans use when they mean “fascist”) apologia for police violence, and if I had seen only the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, I might even have concurred. But Zahler’s – his actual political opinions don’t terribly matter here – too interesting a director to actually go this boring and unpleasant route. The film’s conscious parallel construction between the - very similar if you strip away some of the concessions of class and race - lives of Brett and Henry (even though it does spend more time on the former than the latter) in practice really rather reads like a subtle critique of the system and the forces that push people like these two into corners they can only fight their way out by becoming objectively worse men, leaving somewhat more naturally decent men bleeding out by the wayside.

Mainly, though, the film is interested in understanding its characters, the place they come from and the places they go to, using the pretty traditional genre tale it tells to explore characters rather than issues, and in the end, when it has to decide between making a point about issues or staying true to these characters, always comes down on the side of the latter.


Formally, this is a slow, long film, with scenes and shots that go on much longer than has ever been en vogue in movies (even in the 70s, when something akin to this sort of approach was rather more common). At first glance, this might suggest a bit of an inability to edit things down to something tighter and more functional, but it’s really another way the film focuses on its characters, exploring them slowly and methodically, putting the need to understand them far above any pressures of making them move. The way Zahler does it, it really works out brilliantly, too, trading in speed for precision, and outward drama for intimate understanding.