Content Warning: This article discusses police brutality, police misconduct, rape, sexual harrassment, and abuse.
While Dragged Across Concrete was a minor critical hit upon release, S. Craig Zahler’s Mel Gibson vehicle also earned its fair share of controversy. Dragged Across Concrete is the third feature film from S. Craig Zahler. An extremely slow-burn cop thriller (with a runtime of two and a half hours), Dragged Across Concrete follows the story of two policemen, Ridgeman and Lurasetti, who have been friends since childhood. Suspended after a video of their misconduct goes viral, the pair are forced to join forces with a professional thief to earn some money in a plan that soon goes disastrously, bloodily awry.
Upon release, Dragged Across Concrete was praised for Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn’s performances as Ridgeman and Lurasetti. However, viewers who read the above description and assumed the pair would be complicated characters could leave the movie dismayed. Unlike the Lethal Weapon franchise, Dragged Across Concrete does depict its police officer heroes committing police brutality. However, Gibson and Vaughn’s characters are made out to be heroes despite this, and Dragged Across Concrete’s plot displays a distinct reactionary bent that proved controversial upon the movie’s release. Casting Gibson always causes controversy, but Dragged Across Concrete’s scandals came as much from its handling of police brutality and racism and its production.
Dragged Across Concrete's Themes Make It Controversial
Dragged Across Concrete arguably doesn’t condemn police brutality as much as the movie excuses it. Dragged Across Concrete’s villains, the sadistic Vogelmann and his gang of Grey Gloves and Black Gloves, are cartoonish evil monsters whose absurd brutality serves to undermine the crimes that Ridgeman and Lurasetti commit. Dragged Across Concrete is darker than even the original Lethal Weapon, with its corrupt cops actively taking part in a robbery due to their desperate circumstances. However, Ridgeman and Lurasetti’s violence against civilians is depicted as an inevitable part of police work, while Dragged Across Concrete’s villains castrate a man and murder a new mother during a bank robbery.
Why Dragged Across Concrete Is Considered Problematic
In the hellish reactionary reality depicted by Dragged Across Concrete, police only resort to brutality because they are dealing with larger-than-life villains like Vogelmann and his gang. Ridgeman and Lurasetti’s torture of civilians is treated as par for the course, while their casual prejudice is played for laughs. While not every action thriller needs to reflect reality, Dragged Across Concrete’s story opted to directly address real-life issues like racial profiling and police brutality while simultaneously depicting police work with less realism than an average episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine depicts the NYPD. This inevitably led to controversy upon the movie’s release as critics noted Dragged Across Concrete’s reactionary elements.
However, this was not the only reason that Dragged Across Concrete proved controversial. Dragged Across Concrete, like the rest of Zahler’s movies, was a Cinestate production. This Texas-based production company shut its doors in 2020 due to multiple articles exposing rampant misconduct on the sets of Cinestate productions. Accusations of rape, sexual harassment, and onset abuse led to Cinestate shutting down in 2020, a year after the mixed reactions to Dragged Across Concrete. The company’s remaining productions were completed by a new company in partnership with the conservative network Daily Wire, while Zahler has not released a movie since Dragged Across Concrete.