BEFORE: Still trying to catch up - it's Saturday and I'm working on Sunday so I have to strike while the iron is hot, today's film is a rather LONG one and so therefore let me get to it, I may end up posting on Sunday but the film really needs to be watched on Saturday.
Another super-rainy day, the first of many this spring perhaps, but so far our backyard drains have been clear and/or our sandbags are holding, because we haven't had any water in the basement in a while, not in late fall and now not in early spring, which is a relief. I'm glad we put the sandbags in place when we did, it's a load off of my mind. Now if it rains hard when we're out of town and the drain clogs, we might still be OK.
Thomas Kretschmann carries over from "Gran Turismo".
THE PLOT: When two overzealous cops get suspended from the force, they must delve into the criminal underworld to get their proper compensation.
AFTER: My first thought is that this film did NOT need to be over two and a half hours long, naturally I'm going to feel that unless the film is "Titanic" or "The Lord of the Rings" important, probably some kind of editing needed to be applied to tighten things up a bit. Certainly I felt I needed an extra jolt of caffeine tonight to make sure I didn't fall asleep at the two-hour mark. This has been a problem lately, even with relatively shorter films like "Song of the Sea".
Then I realized this film is kind of a slow burn, it starts out sort of tame and then keeps building and building in intensity, and maybe it just needed a lot of room to DO that, who am I to judge? Certainly the last couple of Tarantino films were extra long because they needed to be - like "The Hateful Eight" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" were both well over two and a half hours, and nobody was really complaining, were they? "Babylon" was over three hours, though, they had a few decades of Hollywood history to cover, and I bet more people were sitting in the theater for that one, desperately hoping it would end soon. I mean, come on, a Tarantino film is a rare treat, you might as well make it as long as you can and squeeze every bit of entertainment you can get out of the ticket price. That's a bargain no matter how you look at it.
But then I started thinking about Tarantino and "Dragged Across Concrete" started to feel a bit like a Tarantino film - not like "Pulp Fiction" quality necessarily, because nothing's really "Pulp Fiction" except "Pulp Fiction". Or is it? I think if you look real hard, you might find some similarities here to Tarantino's masterpiece, or at least the spirit of it. If you changed John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's characters from hit-men to cops, and then just re-cast them with Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn, I think you'd be close, both films have a team that works together begrudgingly, has their own way of doing things and their own little language shortcuts, though I still don't know why one character here said "anchovies" so often.
There are also three intersecting plotlines, and we don't know the connections between the plotlines at first because, well, they haven't happened yet. This also kind of calls "Pulp Fiction" to mind, because we didn't know Butchs story intersected with Jules and Vincent's story until it did, and then when it did, WOW, what a doozy. And then Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, where do they fit into the story? Oh, right, then we find out in the last segment. There's no similar manipulation of time in "Dragged Across Concrete", everything here seems to occur in the proper order, but the film starts with a man named Henry, visiting his mother's apartment shortly after getting out of prison, before it jumps over to the two main characters, and it's a LONG time before we find out how Henry's story intersects with theirs. Then midway through the film there's a new mother leaving her apartment for her first day back to work, and this feels straight out of left field, like how does this fit in with the main story? She just wants to go back and spend time with her new baby and NOT go to work, helping rich people move around their money while trading the hours of her life for a paycheck, but that's the job. It seems very normal, if out of place, until her story collides with the other one. Sure, we all have days where we wish we could just stay home and not go to the office, but baby needs diapers and gourmet baby food and is going to need school supplies and college tuition someday. That's life.
The main storyline is these two cops who get suspended for six weeks because one got caught on camera roughing up a suspect and using a racial slur, and damn if everyone doesn't have a camera on their phones these days, so it looks bad for the Bulwark (?) PD if they don't take some disciplinary action. While on suspension, the senior officer, Ridgeman, realizes that his neighborhood is no longer safe, his daughter got a soda dumped on her by some other teens (and I think the severity of this is right on point, like you can call this an "assault" but it's not like they hit her or raped her, which would have demanded a larger response) so he and his ex-cop wife (who has a disability) decide it's finally time to move out of the city. Which they need money to do, but he's just been suspended. So Ridgeman gets the bright idea to call in a favor and find a new drug dealer in town, someone who might not know their way around, and hit that guy up for some protection money, or just rob him outright. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?)
Well, a lot could go wrong, because the guy they find out about is new in town, works out of a building that's technically abandoned in a room that doesn't even exist, so naturally he must be up to something. Ridgeman and his partner (who's there reluctantly) decide to stake the guy's place out, and it's several days before anything really happens - hey, maybe this is why the movie is so long overall, because they really want the audience to FEEL the boredom associated with a police stake-out. The many cups of coffee, the naps in the back-seat, your partner's bad breath and the fact that he won't stop saying the word "anchovies" or giving you the likeliness of things happening in percentages. The stake-out goes on so long you might just wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just pick up a part-time job somewhere or maybe volunteer somewhere for a couple weeks, could be very fulfilling.
But eventually something happens, the dealer from out of town meets up with his associates, who were seen in little plotlines of their own earlier in the film, in bits that you might also have reason to wonder, about what exactly these little asides mean, and when are they going to be important to the movie, if at all? They've got a van customized to be bullet-proof, and disguised as a security company van - Ridgeman and Lurasetti just think that they're making a drop-off or exchange somewhere, and they follow along to intercept it and disrupt the dealer's business at the same time. But then they get more than they bargained for when they learn what the dealer is really up to, it's a full-fledged heist that they've stumbled on to, and accidentally followed from the beginning. It's important to remember that they're not cops at this point, still they probably could have or should have called it in, but then that would interfere with their plan to make some money by robbing the robbers, wouldn't it?
At some point, their police training kind of kicks in, and they end up trailing the van across the county lines and through some rural territory, figuring that at some point the crew is going to either stash the van or switch vehicles, and there may be an opportunity to ambush them, and then either keep the stolen property, or do the right thing and turn it in. I suppose that depends on how the confrontation goes, and which of the interested parties is left standing in the end.
Also starring Mel Gibson (last seen in "Blood Father"), Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Term Life"), Tory Kittles (last seen in "Harriet"), Vanessa Bell Calloway (ditto), Michael Jai White (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Jennifer Carpenter, Laurie Holden (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber To"), Don Johnson (last seen in "Book Club: The Next Chapter"), Udo Kier (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "Together Together"), Justine Warrington (last seen in "The Professor"), Matthew MacCaull (last seen in "Midway"), Primo Allon (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Jordyn Ashley Olson (last seen in "The Shack"), Myles Truitt, Tattiawna Jones (last seen in "Tully"), Richard Newman, Vivian Ng, Andrew Dunbar, Noel G. (last seen in "Street Kings"), Andres Soto, Tristan Jensen, Eric Bernpong, Liannet Borrego, Adam Tsekhman, Dalias Blake, Giacomo Baessato (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Jenn Griffin, Cardi Wong, Cameron Grierson.
RATING: 7 out of 10 egg salad sandwiches
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