Titles of films are not usually so conscientious in giving you an exact sensory impression of the forthcoming entertainment. This title pretty much lets you have it like the feelaround cinema once envisioned in Brave New World and Kentucky Fried Movie. You’re aware of concrete abrading skin – and maybe the calloused grip grabbing the shirt-collar at the back of your neck or the gun barrel jammed somewhere intimate. Maybe this was originally just a working title, something scribbled down as a temporary placeholder until everyone came to see how appropriate it was.

S Craig Zahler, the director of the bizarre western horror Bone Tomahawk in 2015, has now put together this brutal, nasty, often brilliant Grubby Harry exploitation crime-thriller with flourishes of horror and sadism within its unhurried stakeout tempo and chapter-length scenes, aspiring to the tradition of George Higgins or Ed Bunker. I should point out the critical cognitive dissonance involved in praising anything to do with the disgraced-but-not-overwhelmingly-penitent Mel Gibson. Just as with his directorial effort Apocalypto, I have to pause after each keystroke to give a yelp of resentment.

But for all its ambient nausea and cynicism, I have to admit to having been gripped a lot of the time by Dragged Across Concrete. Gibson plays Brett, a cop pushing 60 in a fictional US anytown resembling Vancouver, stoutly named Bulwark. Brett has career stagnation due to his persistently violent attitude to suspects. His former partner Calvert (Don Johnson) has been promoted way ahead of him – due, we are given to understand, to his greater facility in ass-kissing and political correctness. Now Brett’s partner is Anthony, played by a more-than-usually-engaged Vince Vaughn, and together our two amigos participate in an overzealous drug bust; this results in a work- and income-related disaster causing Brett to suggest to Anthony a certain off-the-record freelance opportunity. Anthony agrees to go along with it, while sorrowingly calling this “a bad idea – like lasagne in a can”.