YMMV / Dragged Across Concrete

• Accidental Aesop: A handful:
  • Cameras are everywhere, so don't you think you can get away with some nasty stuff just because you think nobody saw it.
  • Be nice to your associates and co-workers, or they will turn on you. The worse you treat them, the worse they will react when their Rage Breaking Point is reached.
• Awesome Music: Just like with Brawl, The O'Jays return to provide catchy original songs written by Zahler himself. Case in point: Shotgun Safari.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Some have accused the film deliberately invoking this by casting Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn (two of the most outspoken right-wing actors in Hollywood) to headline a crime picture involving police brutality and racism.
• Broken Base: Kelly Summer's storyline, specifically her abrupt, tragic fate. It's either an effective and somber way of humanizing Vogelmann's victims and reinforcing the movie's incredibly bleak look at the consequences of crime, or it's a tacked-on and gratuitously cruel attempt at establishing the villains' cruelty that clogs up the runtime considering she is never addressed or referenced again following her death.
• Catharsis Factor: Seeing Ridgeman and Henry gun down all of Vogelmann's crew one by one proves immensely satisfying after all of their heinous crimes.
• Complete Monster: Lorentz Vogelmann is the leader of a group of violent bank robbers. Eager to steal gold bullion as soon as possible, Vogelmann had his partners in crime rob and murder random civilians so they could use the money to buy an armored van for the robbery. During the robbery, Vogelmann and his cohorts slaughter several bank employees when one of them tries to contact the police; castrate the bank manager; and take one of the survivors hostage. Vogelmann and his men later kill one of their getaway drivers and attempt to kill officers Brett Ridgeman and Anthony Lurasetti when they try to steal the gold from them. Vogelmann later threatens to kill the hostage's family if she doesn't murder the two officers, which results in the death of Lurasetti and the hostage.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Everything Vogelman's crew does. The absurdly violent nature of their hits and then the bank heist is so over-the-top it comes round through scary and then back to darkly humorous.
• Ending Fatigue: The shootout towards the end and the aftermath of it go on for quite a while, though thankfully the epilogue is resolved in a relatively neat and tidy manner.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Vogelmann crew jump straight over it during the bank heist that kills Kelly Summer and results in the castration of the bank manager and just keep going forward without stopping due to what they put Cheryl through.
• Narm: To some viewers, Kelly Summer's execution is so abrupt and needlessly cruel, especially after all the screentime dedicated to the character, it becomes darkly comedic, especially since her death involved her head literally exploding.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Don Johnson and Udo Kier have one very notable scene each, the former as Ridgeman and Lurasetti's boss while the latter is a Friendly Enemy of Ridgeman's who helps point the duo in the direction of Vogelman.
  • The unnamed man who sells Vogelmann's crew the getaway van. Introduced calmly smoking a cigarette and talking on a cellphone as Black Gloves approaches him with a raised pistol, he proceeds to act completely unimpressed with the Ax-Crazy thief's attempts at intimidation, only looking slightly annoyed with Black Gloves keeps interrupting him by spraying the van down with gunfire. He's one of the only people Vogelmann's crew interacts with who walks away unharmed.
  • Fred Melamed appears for literally 5 minutes as the bank manager, and is as hammy as you'd expect him to be even in this small role.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Kelly Summer all the way, with many agreeing that having another main character simply acknowledge what happened to her could've helped avert this rather than have her meet such an incredibly cruel fate and never be mentioned again.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This is a very bleak, very long movie with two very flawed protagonists. All the other characters are either monstrous criminals or hopeless victims, with two in particular meeting some incredibly cruel fates via Shoot the Shaggy Dog. As a result, this movie can leave a bad taste in some viewers' mouths despite the Bittersweet Ending and semi-hopeful conclusions to several character arcs.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In the end, Henry posts a cigar box with a couple small gold bars inside... while taking for himself four large duffel bags full of them. By the time she receives it, Melanie Ridgeman's sclerosis is so advanced she only has one arm working. She's spent the past year fending for herself and her daughter, while Henry is living in a luxurious mansion, having successfully laundered all the money and never has to worry about anything at all for the rest of his life. This is especially jarring, since it's obvious the screenplay intention was to show he kept his promise to Ridgeman, but the execution of the scene just undermines it.
• The Woobie:
  • Ridgeman's wife and daughter. The former is slowly succumbing to sclerosis that eventually leaves her with one functioning arm while the latter is bullied horrendously during her walks to and from school, with every one of them stuck in an impoverished neighborhood.
  • Kelly Summer. Returning from maternity leave with very blatant postpartum depression and anxiety, she is cruelly gunned down by the Gloves duo just for trying to be a hero.
  • Cheryl. As the Sole Survivor of Vogelmann's heist, she is taken hostage, has her pants and underwear forcefully ripped off and left that way for the rest of her captivity, and is threatened to kill the lead duo, resulting in her own execution by Ridgeman's gun. Shoot the Shaggy Dog indeed.

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