The crime-thriller Dragged Across Concrete is tough. Uncompromising. Bleak. Un-PC. A bad-cop epic to some.
Directed by S. Craig Zahler it has Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn playing a pair of grouchy, unlikable cops who don’t mind playing dirty to get their hands on some money.
Director/writer Zahler has some pretty fierce films behind him — Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99 — so needless to say Dragged Across Concrete is mature viewing only.
He wrote Dragged Across Concrete in a little over a month, but the nearly three-hour movie has divided critics. See some samples of what they’ve been saying below.
JUDGEMENT
“Payback is the name of one of the grittiest, pulpy, noir, cop movies ever, which Mel Gibson starred in before his public fall from grace a few years back. While that movie was hip and very funny, Dragged Across Concrete, while even more violent, is also more realistic and therefore sadder. But Gibson also hereby reclaims his status as one of our better actors. And Dragged is not without humor.” Mark Jackson, Epoch Times
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“If the best Persian carpets carry a deliberate flaw — a thread out of place, say, or an unfinished petal, to avoid offending God’s perfection — it’s true also that the best movies are often troubled by the sense that everything is not entirely hunky-dory. In this new, bleak and often unexpectedly grand genre movie (it’s essentially a buddy-cop flick, but with operatic ambitions), the thread out of place, both irritably scratching and strangely arresting, is Mel Gibson.” Kevin Maher, The Times
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“By careless accident, I’ve now seen S. Craig Zahler’s nasty police thriller twice, which is two times more than most people will need to. Unless they have a real penchant for pictures that, despite all the initial swagger and style, turn out to be unpleasantly violent, over-reliant on Quentin Tarantino for wordy, blood-soaked inspiration, are demeaning to women and go on — criminally — for over two-and-a-half hours.” Mathew Bond, Daily Mail
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“Zahler is working a classical road here narratively — a man who feels cheated by life and goes to extremes to correct the bad hand he’s been dealt — but he’s lined that road with hot topic land mines. Ridgeman believes that he’s at a point where stopping the drug trade doesn’t matter as much as doing it in a PC way, so he’s going to stop playing by the rules. He then gets a tip about a money exchange that he can rob, which means retirement and moving his wife and daughter to a safer neighborhood.” Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com
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“Dragged Across Concrete is apt to send crime-film fanatics, especially ones who prefer their pulp nasty, brutish and incredibly long, into frothing fits of glee. For other folks, the title will double as an apt description of the experience you get in watching it. Mileage is going to vary. You may, like us, thoroughly enjoy it and then have to make peace with the fact that you might go to hell for digging it as much as you do.” David Fear, Rolling Stone
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“Back in his prime, before he fell from grace in Hollywood, Mel Gibson used to star as the swaggering cop in the hugely popular Lethal Weapon buddy movies. He is a policeman again but looking an older and altogether more chastened figure in S. Craig Zahler’s juddering new thriller, Dragged Across Concrete. This is the kind of hardboiled, violent and cynical genre filmmaking that Robert Aldrich specialized in late in his career. It takes a very dark view of human nature.” Geoffrey Macnab, Independent
