With his first two features, Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, writer-director S. Craig Zahler amassed a dedicated cult following with films that reveled in graphic violence. The ultraviolent exploitation attitude of Zahler’s work is certainly bound to appear in his upcoming third feature Dragged Across Concrete. The film premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival where it received a mostly positive response. Today Summit Entertainment has unveiled the first trailer for S. Craig Zahler’s latest violent provocation.
Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn star as a couple of veteran cops with a history of violence that just so happens to have resulted in a suspension for the two of them. Plot details for Dragged Across Concrete aside from the fact that these bad cops use their suspension to get badder are scarce in this trailer, as it really attempts to give you more of a feel about the various moving parts in this collision between cops and robbers. Co-starring alongside Gibson and Vaughn in Dragged Across Concrete are Tory Kittles, Michael Jai White, Jennifer Carpenter, Laurie Holden, Fred Melamed, Thomas Kretschmann, and Don Johnson.
Undoubtedly, there are many who are eagerly awaiting Dragged Across Concrete. I wish I could join them, but I’m not much of a fan of S. Craig Zahler’s neo-exploitation flicks. Both Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99 left me cold, and the problematic aspects of those films felt extremely regressive to this viewer. I fear that Dragged Across Concrete will be just as regressive, and the casting of Mel Gibson as a violent, potentially racist cop seems extremely misguided.
We’ll know if Dragged Across Concrete lives up to its early buzz and assuages my concerns when Summit Entertainment releases the film in select theaters and VOD platforms on March 22, 2019.
The official synopsis for Dragged Across Concrete:
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE follows two police detectives who find themselves suspended when a video of their strong-arm tactics is leaked to the media. With little money and no options, the embittered policemen descend into the criminal underworld and find more than they wanted waiting in the shadows.