2017; written and directed by S. Craig Zahler; 132 mins
If you’re a film fan, then in the last year, you cannot help but have heard the fevered reviews of S. Craig Zahler‘s apparently morally ambiguous police brutality buddy movie, Dragged Across Concrete starring avowed right-wingers Vince Vaughn and Mel Gibson. Reviews ranging from suspicious to annoyed. I don’t know that I’m that fussed about sitting through 3 hours of trolling (if that is what so many people have said it is). However, his movies have consistently raised eyebrows and I’ve been increasingly curious to see what he has to offer…
Brawl in Cell Block 99 tells the story of Bradley, a massive con, sent to prison for his involvement with a drug transfer gone wrong. He was trying to build an ideal life for his pregnant wife, Lauren but now he faces years in prison, missing his daughter’s entry into the world. To make matters worse, dangerous people are holding her ransom until he kills a man to pay his apparent debt.
Actually, this is very good. Vince Vaughn – who I’ve never really liked – is stunning. You believe him all the way and that’s crucial because of how far this movie goes. He embodies a man who isn’t quite what he seems. Bradley definitely has a problem with his rage and not just the seismic double revelation at the beginning but that he clearly gets angry when people call him “Brad” or an early speech in which he tellingly, forensically describes his problems with getting trim milk in his coffee. The film isn’t just about saying he’s a skinhead but he’s not all bad. It is very definitely about the shade over the light.
In the end, it’s a film about a horrible world in which the only way to win against the horror is to be the most horrible. It’s clearly a film re-iterating that prison and systems based on punishment over rehabilitation don’t work. In fact, in it’s second half, it has to be the most overtly hellish prison movie I’ve ever seen. However, it feels hellish because there becomes something otherworldly about it aswell. With Zahler and DP Benji Bakshi‘s camera direction, what began as seemingly perfunctory handheld tightens over the course of the movie to a locked-off, distancing glare as the film becomes more and more disturbed. It’s as if the film wants to get away from it’s own characters and just stands by whoever it’s safest to be near.
Similarly, production designer Freddy Waff takes us from locations that are not necessarily nice but homely and recognisable to the arse-end isolation of a medium-security prison and thence to the medieval dungeon of Cell Block 99 that may as well be on another planet, so far does it seem from civilised society. This is a prison movie in which you really do feel shut off.
This sadly bleeds into the problems. The most sickening acts of violence occur in Cell Block 99. Curiously, hideous wounds are caused but without much blood. However, in these moments, it feels more like a darkly effective stylistic choice than a flaw. Whilst those certainly hit their mark on the audience, there are moments that fail. Late on, a character’s head gets blown apart and the prosthetic head is so glaringly fake that it defers the moment. What should be sad and shocking is blunted by an odd desire for splatter over emotion.
It’s the same with a scene much earlier on between Bradley and Lauren as he’s about to be incarcerated, in which Vaughn’s eyeline is completely off. I was unsure whether he’s meant to be looking at her or is deliberately looking away. If it’s the latter then Zahler doesn’t establish what he’s looking at and it becomes confusing and nulls what is a very emotional scene.
Zahler is clearly a novelist and that’s both a pro and a con. In it’s first hour, whilst there is some excellent set up of complex and interesting characters – especially Jennifer Carpenter as Lauren, the woman who isn’t the tiny wifey you think she’s gonna be – there is too much of it. Whole scenes could go and by the end, I was more than ready to be done but on the whole, it felt more like a full experience rather than it being too long. I suspect Dragged Across Concrete is the latter and not just for reasons of pacing.
It’s obvious he likes alpha male narratives but it’d be simplistic to call this a ‘man’s gotta do wot a man’s gotta do’ story (as others have done) because that phrase suggests a level of romanticism which this movie completely rejects. It’s like the Reservoir Dogs argument. Does that film glamourise it’s subjects? Not really. Both films are far too grim to have any glamour. Just because the characters have smart lines of dialogue and they’re genre films, doesn’t make them approving of everything that happens. There is almost no music and when it does come along, it’s this foreboding Carpenter-esque, electronic dirge. Brawl in Cell Block 99 most obviously evokes Riot in Cell Block 11, which had a clear message about the dehumanising effects of the prison system. Whilst this is, in many ways, looking back as a genre piece and doesn’t obviously move the message along, in the violence of it’s vision, this film brings itself up to date because anyone who’s taken even a cursory glance at the American prison system will know it looks fucking terrifying. As does this.
The funny thing is, Tarantino keeps coming up in conversation of Zahler’s work and whilst there are similarities in their work, Zahler definitely is his own artist. Whatever Dragged Across Concrete is, politically, if the writer/director is a conservative, it seems to me that he is a conservative you can talk to. Who understands that the world is complex as opposed to so many moronic, screaming Trump supporters. In the end, I felt far less uncomfortable with this film’s politics than I did with those of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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