Mark Reviews Movies: DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2019

The central question of Dragged Across Concrete isn't which characters among the ones presented here are good. It's whether or not it's even possible to be good in a world such as this one. Writer/director S. Craig Zahler gives us a little bit of distance to the material—by making the city in which it's set fictional, by making his characters talk in a uniformly elevated way, and by amplifying the pulpy nature of this story, which goes from simple routine to ugly, sometimes grotesque violence with little warning. It's the only way, perhaps, that the filmmaker can make this nihilistic view of humanity tenable.

Every character here is flawed in some way. There's a pair of cops: One of them is about as close to being an overt racist as a person can be without making it painfully obvious, and the other is the sort who's caught smiling on a cellphone video when his partner pushes a suspect's head into the grating of a fire escape with his foot. There's an ex-convict, just released from prison, whose first thought, when he sees the state of his mother and his younger brother, is to go back to crime, and there's his friend who encourages the thought.

What's fascinating about Zahler's approach is that he never asks us to sympathize with these men, but he does want us to understand why they make the choices that they make. It's always money, but beneath the millions upon millions of dollars of cash and gold bullion that's on the line in this story, there's a desire to make things better—not for the characters themselves but for the people they love.

Their thinking might warped, and their methods might be crossing multiple moral and legal lines. At the very least, though, we have to empathize with the unifying motive that drives these men. We don't have to like them, and by the end, it's pretty clear that Zahler doesn't expect us to like them. That's irrelevant to the film's success as a meticulously crafted thriller that also serves as a morality play, which pits understandable but severely flawed men, who possess a semblance of humanity in their goals, against a group of criminals whose actions and wholly selfish motives make them seem like evil incarnate.

The story begins with Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), who has been released from prison. We don't learn the nature of the crime for which he was incarcerated until near the end of the film, but based on the timeline of his stated criminal actions, it follows the sort of misguided selflessness that's the mark of the rest of these characters.

While Henry was locked up, his mother (played by Vanessa Bell Calloway) has spent all of the money he left her, partly on heroin, and has fallen behind on bills, turning to sex work to make some cash. This situation is intolerable for Henry, mostly because of its effect on his younger brother Ethan (Myles Truitt), who is confined to a wheelchair. To make some money for the family, Henry agrees to join his best friend Biscuit (Michael Jai White) on a job, arranged by a criminal acquaintance.

Most of the story, though, follows police detective partners Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), who are suspended without pay after a video of their excessive handling of a suspect goes online. Zahler gives the cops the opportunity to voice their complaints about potentially being branded as racists. It's easy to hear the political grandstanding of the scene, but it might be easier to overlook how that scene ends—with their boss (played by Don Johnson) taking Brett aside to point out that, no matter the politics of the department or the world, he was in the wrong.

The straightforward plot has Brett—concerned about his multiple sclerosis-suffering wife Melanie (Laurie Holden) and regularly accosted teenage daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) living in poverty-stricken part of town (Brett and his wife, a former cop, think of the neighborhood in a different way)—come up with a plan to rob an alleged drug dealer. Anthony, who worries about the kind of life he can provide for his girlfriend Denise (Tattiawana Jones) if she accepts his forthcoming marriage proposal, goes along with the scheme.

Zahler takes his time with this simple plot. We comprehend the procedural elements of Brett and Anthony's surveillance of a mysterious apartment, which exists on paper but doesn't appear to exist in the real world, and their tracking of its inhabitants and visitors. The filmmaker relishes in the idiosyncratic way these characters talk (Brett is all about odds and probability, and Anthony's favorite interjection is "Anchovies!") and what that means about their personalities (Brett can keep at a distance from the possibility—and, later, the reality—of horror, and Anthony has a certain cleanliness of character that isn't prepared for what's about to transpire).

Meanwhile, Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann), the apparent drug dealer, has his own plan in mind. In between scenes with the cops, we witness the utter, depraved inhumanity of the criminal and his two accomplices (played by Primo Allon and Matthew MacCaull), who, for no rational reason, execute innocent people after robbing them. The morality of Zahler's world here is on a sliding scale, in which every major player is a criminal in some way. The one constant, though, is Vogelmann and his henchmen, whose cruelty knows no bounds. There's an interlude of sorts that features a new mother (played by Jennifer Carpenter) as she heads back to work after maternity leave. Zahler's view of the world is never as clear as in how that sequence of events is punctuated.

The film offers no heroes, because everyone, to one degree or another, is complicit in the terrible crime that unfolds (not to mention the lengthy, dynamic standoff that serves as the film's climax). It offers no solace in its outlook, which sees human beings as either predators or prey. One could argue that Zahler is condoning or even espousing this worldview with Dragged Across Concrete, but at worst, the filmmaker is simply pragmatic in his acceptance of such a viewpoint. In reality, though, Zahler's more thoughtful and even mournful approach seems to be summed up when one character tells another that he should have trusted him.

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