#he’s a tory war criminal your honour

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Dragged Across Concrete (Zahler, 2018)

This review contains mild spoilers.

I decided to give this a rewatch after being mixed on Brawl in Cell Block 99 to see how it held up. The thing that lingered heaviest in my memory was the scene where the cop protagonists played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn, having been suspended for being caught on camera brutalizing a suspect, sit across a table from their lieutenant played by Don Johnson as all three of them complain about political correctness. And that scene is as embarrassing as I remembered, the cinematic equivalent of your crazy uncle’s Facebook post. But it is followed shortly by Johnson gently pushing back against Gibson, positing that while he’s certainly sympathetic to Gibson for all his years of service, he did use much more force against the suspect than necessary and that all these years on the street have made him lose his compassion. (Johnson’s involvement may have been another factor in my decision to revisit this. He has limited screentime but is well used, as his presence is softer than Gibson’s and reads as less overtly reactionary. Plus you get old photos of Crockett and Riggs side by side, although the latter is sporting his suburban dad Lethal Weapon 4 haircut instead of the wild man mullet of the earlier, better movies.) On paper this isn’t unlike how the other movie hedges its bets by placing an overt racist character alongside the hero even while proving said character’s words true with its depiction of another set of Latino criminals. (This movie uses a similar trope, but its juxtaposition is less clumsy.) But here, the scene comes after seeing Gibson and Vaughn in the field, where on top of roughing up a suspect, they engage in racial taunting of the suspect’s girlfriend while she’s scared and vulnerable and after manipulating her into cooperating, promptly go back on their word. Put this against Vaughn’s unceasingly righteous hero in the other movie, and the gestures towards complexity here feel more sincere.

There is plenty of objectionable material in the movie along these lines, but you feel it trying to challenge its own views. There’s the cartoonish depiction of the black bullies who taunt Gibson’s daughter and the dialogue his wife is saddled with, and the demeaning fate one of the major black characters is subject to, but this is put up against the presence of a third protagonist, a low level black criminal played by Tory Kittles who sees his involvement with some more dangerous criminals as a way to alleviate the impoverished situation of his family. You could argue that the movie is pulling from stereotypes here too, but to me the depiction of this his family read as empathetic, drawing parallels to the economic difficulties faced by Gibson and Vaughn. And while Kittles is a lower key presence than the other actors, I do like how the movie lets his intelligence sneak up on you. The fact that it eventually shows him to be a more honourable man than Gibson, might read as provocation in the “fooled ya good, ya dumb liberals, stick that in your pipe and smoke it” strain in the context of S. Craig Zahler’s career, but I’d like to think Zahler has been nudged into expanding his outlook. I seem to be in the minority here, but compared to the other movie, it reads less cleanly to me as a reactionary text and more earnestly at war with its ideological shortcomings, not entirely unlike the heroes. Who knows, with a few more movies, we could turn Zahler into a Bernie Bro. For now, let’s just keep the conversation strictly on economic policy and not talk for more than two minutes. Yes, people are facing hardship. Polite nod. Handshake. And call it a day.

And on the whole, I think this is substantially better directed than the other movie. Zahler’s patience once again makes great use of his performers. The casting of Gibson seems in part like a stunt, but the darkness of the actor’s offscreen life hangs over the movie interestingly, making the extent to which he’s morally compromised a lot more convincing. And it goes without saying that he’s as intense and committed as ever. I think Vaughn struggles with his accent and catchphrase, but because Gibson is so damn good, he lifts up Vaughn as well, and I like the texture the movie applies to their camaraderie. The men communicate in a mixture of jargon and percentages, delivered tersely and sarcastically to mask any warmth or affection. During a rare moment of emotional vulnerability, one of them concedes that he’s at a loss for words, as if their masculinity presents something of a trap. And I liked the way Kittles’ subtle intelligence and instincts for self preservation compare to their more forceful presences, and the way the movie parallels his camaraderie with Michael Jai White with the relationship between Vaughn and Gibson. There’s also a rich cast of high impact supporting players, some of whom, like Udo Kier, Fred Melamed and Jennifer Carpenter, seem to be part of Zahler’s stock company.

I also think Zahler’s patience gives the movie a compelling structure. This runs even longer than Brawl, but while that movie seems to spin its wheels before we get to the prison scenes, here I appreciated the way the movie slowly metes out information. The villains’ heist plan and capacity for cruelty doesn’t come into focus until far too late, which has the morbid effect akin to watching two cars for the entirety of their trip up to the moment they crash into each other and then observing the gruesome aftermath in slow motion. The extreme violence doled out by the villains has a pulverizing effect, leaving no gesture of weakness, doubt or basic compassion unpunished. (As morbid as it sounds, one brazenly exploitative detour taken by the movie ends with an image that makes me think this would have had quite the impact in 3D.) The mean streak affords a few laughs too, like when one of the criminals shoots the merchandise and fixtures out of spite after killing a hapless convenience store clerk and a customer with bad timing, although the relentless racial provocations of one particularly ruthless character might be a bit too much to take. The climax plays out seemingly in real time, moments of unbearable stillness punctuated by bursts of horrific violence, captured in yellow filters that evoke the film’s bleak, jaundiced worldview and austere compositions strip the proceedings to down the strategic possibilities and probability of death that each character is faced with. This last stretch is so potent as pure suspense that it makes the movie worth seeing despite its shortcomings.

[heartslobbf]

do you honestly think people like julian bc they agree with his actions

julian is a character that we as an audience are meant to laugh at. you’re not meant to sympathise with him, he is purposefully constructed to ridicule tories and everything they stand for. i’ve seen people say they like julian because he’s ‘good bisexual rep’ or ‘he’s such a father figure’ or ‘he and x character would be so cute together’ and that makes me uncomfortable. he’s not a good or nice person, and when i see people making out like he is all i can think is oh wow you’re a tory sympathiser. like?? why are you defending a man who is openly misogynistic, proud to be a war criminal, etc. additionally, as a queer person i really don’t like it when people say he is queer because he is literally a tory, and he likes margaret thatcher, and those two things really really don’t coincide with the kind of queer representation i want to see, or the kind of queer representation the idiots would give us. it’s actively harmful, if anything, and if you’re not bi and saying he’s bisexual for the sole reason that he shagged around a lot, maybe reflect on why you think that. it plays into biphobic stereotypes.