Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018)

Who is the director behind the mask?

Recently I heard a set by British comedian Nish Kumar in which he explained that while there may be no good right-wing comedy, you could just as easily argue that there are no good left-wing action films. ("Avengers! We must assemble before the UN Security Council and attain approval for multilateral action against Thanos!") I guess this might be special pleading in the case of S. Craig Zahler, since his films (at least the two I've seen) seem to make it a point to dip their toes into certain American conservative talking points -- the bureaucratizing of law enforcement, the tyranny of political correctness, and ultra-specific categories of victimhood that allegedly provide everyone a partial shelter from personal responsibility except poor beleaguered white guys.

I'm deeply ambivalent about Dragged Across Concrete, since I don't buy into the worldview it is felt by many to exhibit. (White guys bitching about identity politics and/or political correctness is like if white guys had cannons, bazookas, M-16s, AK-47s, and every handgun known to man, while everyone else was gifted a single rubber slingshot, and the white guys decried their discriminatory slingshot deficit.) On the one hand, Zahler does give vent not only to the plaints of his two white protagonists, Detectives Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), but to the notion that cops are civil servants who risk their lives putting bad guys away and get very little in return. Taken on its face, this aspect of Dragged is like the Jack Nicholson "Code Red" speech from A Few Good Men writ large.

But you could look at it another way. The ultimate fate of both detectives, and why their plan ultimately goes wrong, has as much to do with paranoia and ironclad suppositions about human nature as it does to do with bad luck. Who represents a threat? In most cases, people are acting based on circumstances not of their choosing, and the one thing that unites the two detectives, the driver Henry (Tory Kittles) and his friend Biscuit (Michael Jai White), and even the hostage (Jennifer Carpenter) is the fact that they are making decisions under duress. 

Being long-time cops, Ridgeman and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Lurasetti have been forced to bracket out this basic understanding of human circumstance. A liberal concept of why people turn to crime would not serve them well in their position; they have to keep it (in some cases literally) black and white. However, as we see, this hard-boiled perception of the world makes them increasingly unfit to "serve and protect," and completely unfit to operate outside the parameters of law enforcement. Thinking like a cop does not, in fact, prepare you to be a good criminal.

Having said all this, my ambivalence comes down to this. I am not certain whether Zahler is a culturally conservative artist. And inasmuch as I find his work intriguing, I do want to parse his semiotics, which includes understanding his political bent. But I am not as concerned with whether Dragged Across Concrete is "conservative" as perhaps I should be. Why shouldn't I appreciate art that arises from a worldview different from mine? Zahler isn't patently offensive in his (supposed) beliefs, and doesn't seem to me to denigrate anyone. (I do think he makes some formal blunders, though. More so than in Brawl in Cell Block 99, some of the dialogue here falls flat and seems overwritten. The relentless use of the n-work, and "anchovies" as a swear, just seem forced.) If I was supposed to be dismayed by the conclusion, as if "the wrong folks won," I certainly didn't get that at all. Overall, I am not sure I know where Zahler is coming from, and so far I'm fine with that.