Brawl in Cell Block 99 review: an unshakeable, mercilessly violent work of full-body cinema
Dir: S. Craig Zahler; Starring: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Udo Kier. 18 cert, 127 mins.
In the brief, bright opening moments of Brawl in Cell Block 99, note well the cross tattoo on Vince Vaughn’s clean-shaven head that runs from nape to scalp. The new film from S. Craig Zahler – a fitting successor to his staggeringly brutal western debut, Bone Tomahawk – is a skin-clawing, fist-gnawing, grindhouse descent into hell, with Vaughn’s Bradley Thomas as the unlikely Messiah with two souls to save at all costs.
They belong to his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) and the couple’s unborn baby daughter, both of whom end up in the clutches of a crystal meth cartel who believe Bradley, a reluctant drug-runner, owes them big for the death of two goons and a seized shipment.
Bradley’s only means of freeing them is to worm his way ever-deeper into the penal system until he reaches Red Leaf Penitentiary’s cell block 99 – “the prison within the prison,” as Warden Tuggs (Don Johnson) ominously calls it. Down here, somewhere in the sepulchral grot, languishes an inmate with a six-figure price on his head, whose termination will wipe clean Bradley’s debt.
To describe the 47-year-old Vaughn’s appearance in a film like this as unexpected would be an understatement. The actor’s motor-mouthing wise-guy persona, established 21 years ago in Swingers, is almost the binary opposite of what’s called for here, which makes his role about as far from a flattering mid-career reboot as it’s possible to get. (This categorically isn’t Vaughn’s version of Liam Neeson doing Taken at 55.)
What matters most about the actor here is his bulk: he’s a strapping 6’5”, and Zahler and his regular cinematographer Benji Bakshi shoot him so we comprehend every inch of it.
Often he looks like a monstrous cross between Bruce Willis and Lon Chaney – a few sizes too big for whatever cell he’s lurking in, plotting the next outrage that will get him bumped down to an even lower, grimmer tier of incarceration, and closer to his target. Vaughn’s performance is hard, dark, and mercilessly committed, and the film gives you nowhere to hide from it – no twangs of irony or conspiratorial winks to take the edge off what ensues.
As with Bone Tomahawk, what does ensue is a tough but unshakeable work of full-body cinema, carried off with a heart-of-stone sincerity that’s janglingly at odds with the inherent ludicrousness of the entire premise. Much of the violence, particularly towards the end, is so frankly graphic it’s close to unwatchable: if it’s been a while since a film has made you throw your hands up to your head and groan “oh no” at no-one in particular, Brawl will scratch that particular itch to bloody ribbons.
But it’s also not all that frequent – and where many films would treat the build-up to such shocks as foreplay, Brawl bides its time, and its brilliant hard-boiled dialogue and pitiless atmospherics are just as vital to the film’s cumulatively bull-dozing effect.
Take Udo Kier, who plays the smart-dressed, softly spoken ‘placid man’ who relays to Bradley a message from the cartel detailing exactly what’s at stake. His words are so casually, blood-freezingly sadistic, they’re no less indelible than some severely nasty business later on involving heads and boots.
Where the film itself falls on the continuum between bruising discomfort and outright sadism is a call for the individual cinema-goer to make: as Bradley’s flat response to a simple ‘How you doing?’ indicates – he describes himself as “south of OK, north of cancer” – these things are always on a sliding scale.
But whatever Brawl is, it isn’t empty torture porn. Though I was regularly so horrified I had to shield my eyes, I was also shaken, gripped and energised. If that reads like a recommendation to you, then it probably is.
