Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Directed by S. Craig Zahler. Starring Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tony Kittles, Michael Jai White, Laurie Holden, Jennifer Carpenter, Tattiawna Jones, Myles Truitt, Thomas Kretchmann, Don Johnson, Primo Allen, Matthew MacCaull, Fred Melamed, Udo Kier. [R]

Long, methodically-paced crime thriller delivers the moral ambiguity, fatalistic provocation, and slow-burn pulverizing we’ve come to expect from writer/director Zahler. Gibson and Vaughn are hard-bitten police partners, recently suspended for applying excessive force on a drug dealer, who embark on a dangerous surveillance of an enigmatic criminal (Kretchmann), intending to rip him off. A little too self-conscious at times, and the payoff isn’t as churlishly satisfying as it could have been, but Zahler knows his way around arthouse pulp excess and populates the wings with intriguing side characters (though one participant is set up with a pointless abundance of personality detail and back story only to kill them off as soon as they enter the main storyline). Same as Zahler’s last two directorial efforts, not recommended for those with an aversion for nasty, ultraviolent genre fare; those that can embrace those qualities can go right ahead.

73/100