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‘Dragged Across Concrete’ Dragged Me Across Concrete
An underrated gory gem now enjoying a resurrection on Netflix.
How in hell did I miss this one? Dragged Across Concrete was largely forgotten, or lumped in with the rest of Mel Gibson’s many “geezer teasers” when it premiered in 2018.
The infamous, multiple Oscar-winning, somewhat professionally redeemed, devout Roman Catholic, and notorious anti-Semite Mel Gibson strikes pay dirt with a hard-hitting neo-noir grisly thriller. If you liked Gibson’s 1999 cigarette smoke-tinted Payback, with its clever tagline, “Get ready to root for the bad guy,” you’ll probably like this modernized pulpy drama actioner that Netflix just released on its platform.
Dragged Across Concrete hit number one on the streaming giant. And it’s not hard to see why. It’s dark, frightful, twisty, and solidly albeit unusually structured. It’s oddball narrative fits the type of style Netflix pioneered in such features as the flashback-heavy, side-character-packed Orange is the New Black, and the fast-forward-reverse of 2018’s The Perfection.
Crime thrillers are a genre that seem to excel at experimental wonky plot lines, seen most famously in Pulp Fiction. But also seen way back in Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 thriller The Killing.
