In short: Last Looks (2021)

Former cop with a conscience – therefore the “former” - Charlie Waldo (Charlie “Yawn” Hunnam) is roped back into the crime solving life when his ex-wife Lorena (Morena Baccarin) disappears just after trying to convince him to help her exonerate British ham actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson) for the murder of his wife. All, so that Shakespearean Pinch can continue his work playing a Southern judge on TV. Charlie’s soon up to his neck (and repeatedly knocked out, as is the tradition) in the case. This also involves a sexy kindergarten teacher (Lucy Fry), a producer with a particularly weird looking head (Rupert Friend), a drug dealer who wants his “mem” (Jacob Scipio), and several old enemies from the police force (among them Clancy Brown).

It might have been better if our protagonist had stayed in his trailer in the woods.

It’s pretty obvious that Tim Kirkby’s movie really, really wants to be a throwback to idiosyncratic 70s private eye movies, aka a kind of movie I like rather a lot. Alas, it suffers from various problems that get in the way of these ambitions again and again.

For one, Kirkby’s personality-free direction is as far from Robert Altman – or Peter Hyams, for that matter – as you can get while still making movies in this particular niche of the genre. Then, Charlie Hunnam most certainly is no Elliott Gould (or Walter Matthau, or James Garner, etc), but in fact still one of the most boring and personality-free actors to put on a stupid beard and not emote into a camera you can encounter. Though, to be fair, the only actors on screen here who seem to have come awake and willing to put even a minimum amount of work in are Fry, Gibson (whose acting has improved as much as his private personality has gotten worse over the years, ironically enough) and Brown. Everybody else seems to suffer from a bad case of “what the hell am I doing here”, or, as in our lead’s case, have never been terribly good to begin with.

The script – by sitcom writer/producer Howard Michael Gould, apparently adapting his own novel, badly, unless it’s a bad novel – meanders from one scene to the next, going through jokes bad, tired, and seldom surprisingly funny, while never getting the point of why those 70s crime movies were strangely paced and meandering, or what would be needed to get away with this today.

In short: Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Having been filmed applying a lot of foot to a drug dealer’s head, veteran – the sort of veteran without any chance of promotion, really – cop Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and his somewhat younger partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), are suspended for six weeks (which seems to put the film into the realm of total fantasy, but hey). This does hit both of them financially quite hard, and Brett, with a wife suffering from MS and a daughter who seems to be a favourite object of bullying and assault in the predominantly black and poor neighbourhood the family live in, decides he is owed more than what he’s getting from life, so why not try and steal some drug money?

At the same time, the film also looks in on small time criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), who has just come out of jail, with little prospect of taking care of his wheelchair-bound son or his own junkie mother who has started turning tricks to survive. The only way for Henry and his family to stay afloat will be a return to the criminal life.

Both of these plotlines will converge in a violent bank robbery and the following grab for the loot.

I’ve seen various reviews tut-tutting at S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete for being some kind of Conservative (which appears to be the word Americans use when they mean “fascist”) apologia for police violence, and if I had seen only the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, I might even have concurred. But Zahler’s – his actual political opinions don’t terribly matter here – too interesting a director to actually go this boring and unpleasant route. The film’s conscious parallel construction between the - very similar if you strip away some of the concessions of class and race - lives of Brett and Henry (even though it does spend more time on the former than the latter) in practice really rather reads like a subtle critique of the system and the forces that push people like these two into corners they can only fight their way out by becoming objectively worse men, leaving somewhat more naturally decent men bleeding out by the wayside.

Mainly, though, the film is interested in understanding its characters, the place they come from and the places they go to, using the pretty traditional genre tale it tells to explore characters rather than issues, and in the end, when it has to decide between making a point about issues or staying true to these characters, always comes down on the side of the latter.


Formally, this is a slow, long film, with scenes and shots that go on much longer than has ever been en vogue in movies (even in the 70s, when something akin to this sort of approach was rather more common). At first glance, this might suggest a bit of an inability to edit things down to something tighter and more functional, but it’s really another way the film focuses on its characters, exploring them slowly and methodically, putting the need to understand them far above any pressures of making them move. The way Zahler does it, it really works out brilliantly, too, trading in speed for precision, and outward drama for intimate understanding.

In short: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Having watched quite a few films written by Shane Black in the last couple of months, I very much saved the best for last, and have now come up with my own private theory (not to be confused with my own private Idaho) about him: Black is a much better writer when he has clear constraints to work in. At the early stage of his career when he wrote this, he just couldn’t quite indulge himself as he can do now most of the time - I assume one reason Iron Man 3 is as great as it is because there are constraints in working with Marvel getting in the way of most of Black’s flaws while helping his virtues as a writer - so he couldn’t indulge in endless variations of having characters mumble “life is pain” but instead had to show us this philosophy (as far as it goes) through the actual plot of the film. There’s also no room for his four-letter word based humour to become obnoxious – there are about half the fucks and bad jokes as in a contemporary Black film in Lethal Weapon, but here all those fucks are perfectly placed and not everyone seems to suffer from Tourette’s, and the jokes are expertly timed at moments when levity is actually useful to the film. Also very atypical for the writer today: the third act is as well constructed and as tight as the rest of the film.

Sure, the action scenes are somewhat more constrained in their dimensions then they would quickly become deeper into Black’s career, but they are tightly constructed and effective, and there’s nothing as lazy needed to set them up as to have a little girl crawl into a truck loaded with explosives. Things are still larger than life, mind you, they are just larger than life in a more effective manner. And the action on screen is great,  showing off stunt work as good as you’ll see it in a US film of any era.

But the human parts of the film work just as well, with leads that are just slightly larger than life (it’s a big screen they are on after all) but have human problems; and when their life is pain, it’s much more believable, and actually a bit touching, which always comes as a surprise in an action film. But then, Black’s script really does seem to know most of the time that the macho culture particularly Riggs breathes is not a healthy place to live.

Acting-wise, this is mostly Danny Glover’s show, who projects a plethora of nuances and feelings through posture and slight changes of the timbre of his voice; Mel Gibson clearly has no idea how to play a guy with Riggs’s problems (as if the first Mad Max didn’t exist) but does his best, even though he tends to default to bug eyes and is usually drawn in useable directions by a Glover who clearly is the Carl Weathers to Gibson’s Schwarzenegger, to stay in 80s action cinema that pairs an excellent black actor with a not that excellent white dude.


This thing is a classic of US action cinema for a reason.