Lionsgate has released the trailer for “Dragged Across Concrete,” which confirms S. Craig Zahler as one of the most notable genre filmmakers working today. Following closely on the heels of “Bone Tomahawk” and “Brawl in Cell Block 99” — whose premiere at the 2017 Venice Film Festival preceded this film’s by just a year — the new film stars Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn as two old-school cops whose habit of roughing up suspects gets them suspended. After said suspension, the partners decide to see how the other half lives by making some money on the wrong side of the law; anyone who’s seen Zahler’s prior work can guess how well that works out for them.
In my Venice review of the film, I wrote that the writer-director “maintains a calm, steady hand over the increasingly brutal proceedings, which is a kind of trick — he puts you at ease when you should be on alert. Even so, stay vigilant while watching ‘Dragged Across Concrete’: Zahler takes his time with all this, sometimes more than he needs to, but the payoff is worth it — he’s a master of tension and release, and once the different narrative threads are woven together it’s difficult to imagine the buildup being any different.”
Tory Kittles, Michael Jai White, Jennifer Carpenter, Laurie Holden, Fred Melamed, Udo Kier, and Don Johnson co-star in the film, which also screened at the BFI London Film Festival. The version that screened in Venice was 159 minutes, but its runtime is now listed at a breezy 147.
Watch the trailer, including Gibson rocking a cop mustache as only he could, below.
Lionsgate will release “Dragged Across Concrete” in theaters on March 22.