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Dragged across concrete6/2/2023 Naturally, they happen to unknowingly pick the group who are currently machine-gunning civilians to pieces while clad in full gimp-suits, and follow them to an armed bank robbery. Along with partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vaughn), he begins the story being excessively violent to a suspect and his girlfriend, and getting caught on camera suspended without pay, the two plot to use all their underworld connections to steal some money from criminals. Mel Gibson’s character Brett Ridgeman is specifically described as a cop who’s been out there doing what he does so long that it’s made him sadistic. But on another, it suggests that being the good guy at all takes a moral toll, and the longer you do it, the worse a person you become. On one level, this is a pragmatic calculation: you need Stalin to defeat Hitler. The trick is that the bad guy is always far worse: if the hero is a bigoted cop, the villain is one who disembowels people so frequently that he’s actually racist about the smell of different ethnicities’ internal organs. But in Zahler’s movie, as in those of Walter Hill and John Milius, the supposed “good” guys are hideously compromised people, usually established as fairly awful by any objective standard. Nowadays, good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated, which is also a somewhat conservative perspective. But let’s be real: most action movies are, at heart, conservative/libertarian: the system nearly always fails, and a good guy with a gun (or other weapon) must defeat the bad guy with the gun (sword, fist, nuke, whatever). That they are the familiar names behind the film automatically triggers certain judgments. The reactions to the film make a decent case for why filmmakers and actors shouldn’t talk politics: Vince Vaughn is a conservative, Zahler is libertarian, and Mel Gibson is in his very own special category.
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