The dialogue has a nicely off-kilter feel.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 4, 2020

Dirty, angry, and it feels like it wants to pick a fight with you.

| Sep 24, 2019

Dragged Across Concrete feels like you're dangling on the end of a meat hook. It's painful and tense and at the same time, a little ridiculous... Even then, it's full of surprises, and riches for those who like it darker.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2019

Despite a running time (more than two and a half hours) that would normally seem excessive for this kind of movie, Dragged Across Concrete is never boring.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 27, 2019

You look back and you pinpoint things that don't belong, adding or detracting...feels like wasted baggage. But this film challenges critics, and challenging audiences, and that's far more interesting than a filmmaker playing it safe.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 2, 2019

What makes the film, which clocks in at 159 minutes, seem less calculating and cynical is the way that slow buildup is steeped in a melancholy that never lets up even through the subsequent violence.

| May 10, 2019

Zahler knows how to command attention, even if it is by way of provocation.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 25, 2019

In this new, bleak and often unexpectedly grand genre movie (it's essentially a buddy-cop flick, but with operatic ambitions), the thread out of place, both irritably scratching and strangely arresting, is Mel Gibson.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 22, 2019

I'll pass.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 21, 2019

This may be an exercise in genre pastiche but it's a surprisingly engaging and affecting one.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 19, 2019

Many genre fans will flinch, but if you can throw down with postmodernity and the prickliness, this is something to see.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 18, 2019

Unrelenting, glib and actually quite intelligent beneath the guts and gore.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2019

Impossible to dismiss, but hard to warm to.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 18, 2019

[Mel] Gibson and [Vince] Vaughn deliver consummate, charismatic performances, particularly in the hilariously slow stakeout scenes where they share Pulp Fiction-esque bantz about foodstuffs.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 17, 2019

The impression is that everything else in this headache of a film is only there to let Mel Gibson say ugly things on screen and thus, as they say, trigger the libs - a feeble use of Zahler's talent.

| Apr 17, 2019

This is a long film, but there is something so horribly compelling about its unhurried slouch towards the precipice.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2019

Dragged Across Concrete is exciting, provocative, and more than a little phony.

| Mar 26, 2019

You never get the sense that Zahler's endorsing his ugly characters' brutal behavior so much as acknowledging that it exists and is worth looking at even if you have to avert your gaze.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 23, 2019

Dragged Across Concrete is an admittedly distinctive but ultimately mediocre movie that provides far more empty calories of exploitation than genuine food for thought.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 22, 2019

For all the absurdist-tragic trappings... this is still your basic boneheaded, right-wing action movie - skewed so that its heroes' moral relativism is meant to be a sign of their manly integrity.

| Mar 22, 2019