A strong double act, but they won’t leave you laughing
WRITER-DIRECTOR S. Craig Zahler made quite an impact with his 2015 debut feature, a strikingly original, exceedingly gruesome, but mostly compelling Western called Bone Tomahawk.
Dragged Across Concrete is also gruesome in parts (especially a sequence that involves a spot of impromptu stomach surgery), and certainly has its compelling moments, but it lasts for a whopping 158 minutes and I left the cinema feeling that it hadn’t been worth the substantial investment of time. It stars Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughan as a pair of capable detectives, Ridgeman and Anthony, who are suspended without pay when Ridgeman is filmed on someone’s phone being a little too brutal while making an arrest.
He is approaching 60, hasn’t been promoted in over 30 years, his wife has multiple sclerosis and his teenage daughter keeps being assaulted by neighbourhood delinquents.
The family needs to move to a nicer area. So the embittered Ridgeman decides to use his detective skills to make some money illicitly, and his younger partner Anthony agrees to join him.
They prepare to bust a major crime operation, assuming it to be a drugs deal. But it turns out to be a violent armed robbery, leading to a showdown in an isolated parking lot.
You wouldn’t think that could take up more than two-and-ahalf hours of screen time, but Zahler doesn’t believe in concise storytelling.
He likes sub-plots and tangents, and tangents to sub-plots, and above all, he likes dialogue so quirky that one of his detectives keeps saying ‘anchovy’ for no obvious reason. Either he has Tourette’s, or it’s his way of implying something’s fishy. I couldn’t tell which.
The problem with quirky dialogue is that if all your main characters indulge in it, then it
becomes clear they’re all speaking the same writer’s lines.
And when you start being too aware of the unseen writer in a feature film, the on-screen characters are in danger of losing credibility.
Despite this, Gibson and Vaughan make a strong double-act, and Tory Kittles, playing one of the criminals, is excellent.
Dragged Across Concrete isn’t a bad film, but all too often it feels like a writer- director indulging himself rather than his audience.