Review: Dragged Across Concrete

Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) is fresh out of prison and looking for a way to make a little money. Old friend Biscuit (Michael Jai White) just might have the job for him, but it doesn’t take long for the pair to realise they’re getting in over their head - working with a couple of stone cold killers who never take their masks off tends to give that impression.

Meanwhile, old-fashioned hard-nosed cops Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) have been caught on camera handing out some street justice and are facing suspension – something neither of them can afford. So now they're looking for a way to make a little money on the side too. This is not good news for anybody.

Writer-director S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99) tells a sprawling (it’s over two and a half hours) crime saga where the sprawl is much of the point: just spending time with these dubious characters is much of the appeal of this film, though when the plot does kick in it kicks hard.  And scene-by-scene this is pretty much all good - even a diversion focusing on a bank staffer (Jennifer Carpenter) who doesn't want to go back to work and be separated from her baby.

Gibson and Vaughn are the acting powerhouses here, which skews the film a little; the story as written gives roughly equal time to both sides but the white guys are the faces you’ll remember. They’re also unlikable in ways that are unfashionable today, and the film gives their racial grievances just enough grounding to make it tricky to tell whether the film is on their side or not.

Which is probably the point, as this constantly strives for (and often reaches) the kind of real-world grit most crime films only gesture at. It's not exactly the kind of film where anything could happen, though it has its share of shocks; rather, it's coming from a direction a lot of crime films (and films in general) today won't take, where the characters exist just as flawed human beings rather than symbols of certain moral or social standpoints.

This is a film that has no real interest in right or wrong, and never at any point indicates that anybody deserves anything that comes to them. Bad people might prosper; good people could come to sticky ends. At a time when movie morality seems stuck at the brightly-coloured superhero level, it's a defiantly grown-up view of the world.

- Anthony Morris

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