S. Craig Zahler, a metal musician and now film director, has been making a name for himself with a series of gruesome movies even for horror fans’ standards: first, Bone Tomahawk was full of a lot of disemboweling and cannibal madness, and his last one Brawl in Cell Block 99 was full of enough brutal face-stompings and bone-breakings to fill up even the most devout gore-hound. Now we have Dragged Across Concrete, which based on the title I figured would be the most violent schlock-fest yet.
And it is pretty violent, yeah. But it also veers into something even more uncomfortable: mild conservative “anti-PC” racism.
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Starring: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter
I mean, it isn’t like they go full on MAGA hat or anything, but having Mel Gibson in a starring role was almost like a wink to the audience as to what this was gonna be like. Him and co-star Vince Vaughn, after their characters get suspended from the force for stepping on a Hispanic drug dealer’s head and neck on video, have a few lines early on about how PC everything is and it made me wonder what the hell this movie was playing at. Oh and another subplot has Gibson’s daughter getting orange juice thrown on her by a black kid while coming home from school, which prompts his wife to opine about how “she never thought she was racist before moving to this neighborhood.”
It’s all pretty perplexing at first – like, are we being asked to sympathize with that world view? Keep in mind that the actual plot has nothing to do with this. It’s like he just added it in for no reason really. It barely comes up again, but the stink of this stuff is striking as you go through the film. I think he was trying to show that yeah, these people exist and there’s not much you can do about it. They have pretty shitty, regressive-ish attitudes and yet they’re still out there working jobs and trying to figure their problems out like the rest of us.
It turns out, surprisingly, that the kind of people who espouse these pretty racist views aren’t dining on baby flesh every night. And not all of ‘em are wearing Klan uniforms or want some white ethnostate – some of ‘em are just mildly shitty. Most, in fact, are more like this than some extremity.
Zahler didn’t have to put any of these things in the movie – they’re ancillary and barely take up 10 minutes of screentime in this 2.5 hour movie. But at the same time, I’d much rather not have only movies that show people I like. That’s not a good path for anybody, that kind of sameness of intent.
If anything I think Zahler is just caught up in a whirlwind not of his own making. He’s just making movies he likes, but the culture around him has changed so rapidly and there are all kinds of voices right now that are genuinely inquiring as to why things are the way they are. And maybe there’s a sort of willful blindness in making a movie like this and just shrugging and going ‘well, it’s what I want to do, it doesn’t need to be political’ like he’s basically done several times. Unfortunately everything’s become political and the world is a goddamn dumpster fire because of it. I enjoy the guy’s movies. But I can see where detractors are coming from there.
But Zahler is nothing if not a storyteller, and we also have other plot threads coming together – another guy, Henry John, played by Tory Kittles, who’s getting back into crime to help his family. Jennifer Carpenter of Dexter fame is back in another Zahler movie, playing a new mother who gets caught up in the mayhem. Gibson and Vaughn’s cop characters get into this plot to steal a bunch of gold from even worse criminals, who Kittles’ Henry John is affiliated with. And Carpenter is kidnapped by the bad guys – people have also harped on this aspect of Zahler’s films, as it’s pretty antiquated damsel in distress type shit, but what can I say? He’s a metal musician and a fan of vintage gore and action movies. Not exactly the guy we should be looking to to lead us into the future.
What ensues is a lot of shootouts, some blood and guts. But also a typically well-paced narrative as Zahler has become known for. He takes his time with these scenes, relishing in showing you their conversations and their stakeouts in the car and their family lives – it’s all just build-up and table-setting but it’s compelling due to its rawness and the extent to which he takes it. It would be less so if he skimmed through it like other movies do.
He takes the audience seriously and delivers a full experience by not just jumping into action or sex or anything. By taking the leisurely and detailed route in setting up his story, the violence and action that comes later has more impact. Most Hollywood movies would just take five minutes to show a spouse character saying “please don’t die” and then jump into the action. Not this one.
The whole thing, like Zahler’s previous movies, comes off as a satisfying full meal. At 2.5 hours you won’t feel like you’ve been skimped on. It’s a three course movie and feels complete. I can’t always say the same thing about, say, a Marvel movie, which feels more like a big cheesy pretzel that will give you gas later.
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