Things go bad “like lasagne in a can” in S. Craig Zahler’s DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE.
Imagine if you will, Mad Max and Martin Riggs at 60 and you get an inkling of Mel Gibson’s character, Brett Ridgeman, a cop who hasn’t made promotion in a quarter century, but has a prodigious amount of busts to his name. The reason for not rising through the ranks being, he is not politik. Certainly not politically correct.He’s old school and gets results but he also attracts reprimands.
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE begins with Ridgeman and his partner, Tony Lurasetti, a loquacious Vince Vaughn, on a drug bust where Ridgeman is videoed standing on the alleged dealer’s head and chaining him to a wrought iron fire escape while he and his partner enter the premises to secure the space and ascertain where the prohibited substances are.
After some not strictly by the book persuasion of another felon inside the premises, they locate the contraband and make a successful collar.
The victory is pyrrhic because passer by footage of the rough handling arrest finds its way onto TV and the two cops are carpeted and suspended without pay.
Ridgeman has a wife with MS and a teenage daughter living at home in a not too salubrious neighbourhood. Tony has just forked out a fortune on an engagement ring for the love of his life, Denise.
Neither cop is corrupt but this latest punitive chastisement is a catalyst for some overdue compensation they believe they deserve for keeping a lid on the imbeciles, Ridgeman’s terms for all form of crook, criminal and miscreant.
Ridgeman’s plan is to capitalise on a criminal enterprise, by robbing the robbers, making the perpetrators pay for their crimes direct to him and his partner. A sort of justifiable Robin Hood scenario.
Like all best laid plans dealing with rotten apples things go pear shaped.
Though Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn are the central characters in DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE there are no minor characters in the film. Each dented soul, no matter how much screen time they exact, is a complete and rounded character, noble or disturbed, freakishly flawed or just plain human.
Notable cameos come from Don Johnson as the police chief, Udo Kier as an urbane crime kingpin.
Zahler’s script is redolent of the cadent callisthenics of the Coen Brothers, the pallet of palate pleasing patter of Tarantino and the prosaic pyrotechnics of Patrick De Witt, crafting dialogue with language that is exacting and persuasive and funny.
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE features a wicked score with songs bearing emblematic titles like Shotgun Safari and Street Corner Lions. It’s a jungle out there, a concrete jungle, be prepared to be dragged across it.
But be warned: DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE is not an action movie and takes it sweet time to cogitate and marinate. And that’s its sweet and savoury surprise.