For the week of April 29th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing S. Craig Zahler's Dragged Across Concrete to Blu-ray. A point of comparison: in Zahler's debut, the horror-western Bone Tomahawk, a man is bisected while he's alive and screaming. In Dragged Across Concrete, someone gets their guts ripped out so some thieves can root around for an important key (don't ask), but at least the victim is already dead when the butchery commences. For Zahler, that living/dead distinction connotes a weird form of maturity, which is the most provocative element of Dragged Across Concrete. Don't get me wrong: Zahler still wants to shock and offend, both in terms of his full-throated approach to violent pulp as well as his beyond-leisurely approach to narrative and pacing. On the subject of the latter, Dragged Across Concrete might cover ground that Elmore Leonard could sketch in a novella - two disgraced cops (Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn) decide to break bad and rip-off a group of career criminals (including Michael Jai White, Thomas Kretschmann, and a terrific Tory Kittles) plotting to rob a bank, thus setting into motion a series of surprising and gory reversals - only Zahler distends the proceedings to an insane 160 minutes, many of which are less incidental than you might think. To wit: in one long, mostly static shot, we get to watch Vaughn eat an egg-salad sandwich, Gibson complain about the smell of Vaughn's meal, and then Vaughn muse about buying/consuming another one. Even Quentin Tarantino (who Zahler has definitely aped throughout his three features) would find such moments indulgent, although I wonder if Zahler isn't a bigger fan of Jim Jarmusch and Takeshi Kitano than he is QT. That willingness to force patience on his audience feels like a move towards maturity, as does the political subtext underlying everything. Zahler seems to be lashing out against both excessive political correctness and unfair stereotyping, and he loves to let these two ideas crash into one another. There are times Dragged Across Concrete plays like a right-wing screed; at one point, Zahler has Vaughn, Gibson, and Don Johnson practically deliver a rant to the camera about the "snowflakes" ruining the police force. And there are times it offers a liberal fantasy; Kittles' black ex-con is the film's most sympathetic character, Vaughn's prejudicial goon is in a biracial relationship, and Gibson dotes after his disabled wife. The result plays like Zahler is trying to uncover the sociopolitical tensions at the heart of contemporary American culture. Ultimately, though, I'm not sure Zahler makes his points as effectively as he thinks he does. Dragged Across Concrete traffics in so many contradictory themes that after a while, it seems "confused" rather than "complex." And while I appreciate Zahler's willingness to indulge his characters and their lives, the film is a punishing sit, and way too narratively thin to support the length. A better film would marinate in the tensions between Kittles, Vaughn, and Gibson more and would use the runtime to enhance the tension. Matter of fact, Zahler has done better twice before, in both Bone Tomahawk and the masterful Brawl in Cell Block 99. Dragged Across Concrete, on the other hand, plays like a messy concept album: interesting but turgid.
For a much better slice of Grand Guignol pulp, Kino Video is offering a 4K remaster of Ridley Scott's underrated Hannibal. I have never understood why critics and fans turned against this Hannibal Lecter chiller so vehemently. Yes, it barely resembles Jonathan Demme's cool, controlled Academy Award-winner The Silence of the Lambs - Scott exchanges Gothic cell blocks for expansive Italian vistas housing Anthony Hopkins' hammy, unrestrained Lecter, and if that weren't enough, Julianne Moore replaces Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling (famously, Foster hated Thomas Harris's Hannibal novel) - but I don't see why it has to. Even in 2001, the Lecter features were hardly a model of narrative and aesthetic cohesion. Michael Mann's great 1986 procedural Manhunter looks like a test run for Miami Vice, while Demme brought a strong humanist agenda to Silence of the Lambs. It stands to reason, then, that Scott's hyper-gory and lurid Hannibal take is just as valid. For one, we're seeing Hannibal in the wild, so to speak. About a third of the film follows Lecter hiding in plain sight as an Italian art curator, and Hopkins clearly relishes the chance to indulge in all the brutality Demme limited to just Lambs' prison-escape sequence. These scenes still feel consistent with the Lecter we met earlier, particularly when Scott lets the title character banter with Giancarlo Gianni (giving the film's best performance as a wry, gently corrupt Italian cop who has no idea how in-over-his-head he is). I suspect, however, that most people take umbrage with the Stateside content, wherein Gary Oldman's hideously disfigured Lecter survivor orchestrates a revenge scheme to kidnap Lecter and feed him to a pack of wild boars. I'll admit - this stuff is a little much, but Scott stages it with such verve it's hard to care. There's something so singular about watching Scott ladle on splatter-movie gore in the most high-toned, prestigious Hollywood package possible. He and DP John Mathieson make Hannibal look like a perfume commercial douses in offal. Characters are violently disemboweled or eaten by pigs or eat their own brains (yep, you read that right) or are simply revolting to look at, in Oldman's case (Greg Cannom's practical work on Oldman is the single most effective makeup job that I've ever seen). Yes, at times Hannibal is so episodic in its brutality that the story falls apart, and while I like Moore's steely intensity, the movie doesn't know what to do with her, yet I'd rather have wild studio fare like this than something more neutered and tame (*coughRed Dragoncough*).
Speaking of wild studio fare: meet Serenity from Universal Home Entertainment. Make no mistake - Steven Knight's postmodern noir-melodrama Serenity is just as nutty as you might have heard. I won't spoil its big twist in full, but it's a doozy, and one that's hilariously incongruous with everything preceding it. In no universe does this Body Heat riff warrant the left-turn Knight engineers. But frankly, it's not like Serenity hadn't fully lost its mind before the big reveal. If you've seen the trailer, you would assume that you're about to watch a neo-noir where Matthew McConaughey's ex-con fisherman gets suckered by his femme fatale of an ex-wife (Anne Hathaway, vamping so hard I can't tell if she knows this material is ridiculous or is taking it 1000% seriously) into killing her abusive husband (Jason Clarke, who's basically doing a live-action Andy Capp). You're probably not expecting, as I wasn't, that so much of Serenity deals with McConaughey's attempts to catch a massive tuna named Justice, or that he spends a disproportionate amount of the film using water to telepathically commune with his estranged son (Rafael Sayegh), including a nude underwater meeting between the two that's definitely way more homoerotic than any of the filmmakers intended. Or that Knight expects us to believe that 49-year-old McConaughey and 36-year-old Hathaway are high-school sweethearts. Or the insane decision to cast Jeremy Strong as, essentially, the most insane character from...well, to name the movie counts as too big a spoiler, but I'll say it's a Tom Cruise programmer that I love that most other folks hate. In essence, Serenity is a perfect Blank Check movie, except I'm at a loss as to what massive success Steven Knight made that would have gotten this deranged picture financed. Maybe McConaughey, Hathaway, and Co. all wanted a paid vacation to Mauritius - the island certainly looks lovely enough. That said, I couldn't be more thrilled that Serenity exists. It isn't even close to any traditional definition of a "good" movie, but it's never boring and always gobsmackingly dumb. Plus, I'm reminded of that old Roger Ebert quote: it isn't what a movie is about but how it is about that matters most. Knight drenches this movie in such intoxicating color-noir atmosphere - it's all rain-drenched surfaces and crystal-blue seas and shadowy venetian blinds - that I willingly submitted to every lunatic twist and turn. You can smell cats coming off this one, and that's part of the fun.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film is at its best at its best in its first 20 minutes, when it's following a man with a dark past and a singular obsession. It's tightly woven, handsomely photographed, and the content draws the viewer into the world. But Karen's arrival is the first of many tonally odd and narratively muddy moments. For her introduction, Knight takes an odd stab at classic overacted and overwritten noir, upsetting the established cadence and not for the only time. As the film moves forward, through jarringly odd transitions and strange styles and unique but very unrefined story beats, it grows increasingly bizarre and distant, yet there remains a certain draw to it. As it becomes more absurd, there's an almost macabre allure to sticking with it and seeing where it's headed, and maybe even why. The film does introduce and explore some good and reliable and, at least in their raw state in Serenity, well-meaning and would-be emotionally deep themes about loss, remembrance, pain, and escape, and from two very unique perspectives. One of the would-be draws to the film comes by way of the psychological consequences of how the revelations reshape the main character. There are some thought-provoking concepts and ideas and themes for the film to unpack, but they are fumbled so badly that all of the groundwork is ultimately for naught. Serenity is so concerned with matching the rhythmic cadence of the story with visuals and tone of equal aplomb that the film falls apart under its own burdens. There's very likely a good or even terrific film here, but a strong open ultimately gives way to a borderline incoherent exercise in how to not make a movie."