Blu-ray Review: 'Dragged Across Concrete' Defends the Deplorable

I am apparently not supposed to like Dragged Across Concrete, the $15 million budgeted S. Craig Zahler crooked-cop thriller that has thus far grossed a mere $160,000+ overseas and was mainly VOD domestically. On April 30th, the movie that has been described as vile and racist, “avant-garde right-wing,” and “the perfect liberal-trolling product of the Trump era,” presumably by writers who rarely watch actual right-wing movies like Unplanned or God’s Not Dead 2, comes out on Blu-ray. And having finally seen it, I shake my head a bit.
The reactions to the film make a decent case for why filmmakers and actors shouldn’t talk politics: Vince Vaughn is a conservative, Zahler is libertarian, and Mel Gibson is in his very own special category. That they are the familiar names behind the film automatically triggers certain judgments. But let’s be real: most action movies are, at heart, conservative/libertarian: the system nearly always fails, and a good guy with a gun (or other weapon) must defeat the bad guy with the gun (sword, fist, nuke, whatever). Nowadays, good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated, which is also a somewhat conservative perspective. But in Zahler’s movie, as in those of Walter Hill and John Milius, the supposed “good” guys are hideously compromised people, usually established as fairly awful by any objective standard. The trick is that the bad guy is always far worse: if the hero is a bigoted cop, the villain is one who disembowels people so frequently that he’s actually racist about the smell of different ethnicities’ internal organs.

Blu-ray Review: 'Dragged Across Concrete' Defends the Deplorable LWvFwQv

Blu-ray Review: 'Dragged Across Concrete' Defends the Deplorable LWvFwQv

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lukethompson/2019/04/23/blu-ray-review-dragged-across-concrete-defends-the-deplorable/#3c0561bb3a32

Blu-ray Review: 'Dragged Across Concrete' Defends the Deplorable

Blu-ray Review: 'Dragged Across Concrete' Defends the Deplorable

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