S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 delivers all the violence the title implies.
But playing against your expectations is the hell of a road Bradley, the main character with a cross tattooed on the back of his skull, walks to get there.
Zahler’s excellent “rescue western” Bone Tomahawk is the story of men confronting hellish cannibals. The heroes and villains are easy to spot.
Brawl is another fight to preserve life but against a cloudier picture.
Moral at heart, main character Bradley’s life is a battle against darkness and circumstances.
When his struggle lands him in prison, the volume gets turned up hundreds of notches, and his fight amplifies into a gripping, visceral, near unreality.
And giving the film a real-life twist, Zahler cast Vince Vaughn in the lead.
Famous for comedies like Old School or Wedding Crashers, you wouldn’t have picked out Vaughn for playing a character with a penchant for putting his fists through car windows.
Yet critics have hailed Vaughn’s performance as his best-ever, leaning into the dramatic chops he’s less frequently shown over his career.
And the movie made The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and A.V. Club’s best-of-the-year lists.
So is Brawl in Cell Block 99 a good movie?
The Plot of Brawl in Cell Block 99:
Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) and his wife, Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter), fall on hard times. To make money, he returns to running drugs for his old associate, Gil (Marc Blucas).
But when a drug pickup goes bad, prison time is just the beginning of the potential consequences.
The Rest of the Main Cast Includes:
- Don Johnson as Warden Tuggs
- Udo Kier as The Placid Man
- Mustafa Shakir as Andre
- Dion Mucciacito as Eleazar
- Thomas Guiry as Wilson
- Geno Segers as Roman
- Fred Melamed as Mr. Irving
- Willie C. Carpenter as Lefty
- Clark Johnson as Detective Watkins
- Pooja Kumar as Denise Pawther
- Tobee Paik as The Doctor
- Rob Morgan as Jeremy
- Dan Amboyer as Longman
- Philip Ettinger as Derrick
- Devon Windsor as Jill
The Good Things:
That Zahler Pacing, +5 Points
You wonder if S. Craig Zahler is cool as a cucumber stuck in traffic in a heat wave. There’s a patient contemplation in his filmmaking where others may rush to cut.
We sit with Bradley on the bus ride into prison. We hang with him as he drives to his boss, Gil’s, house.
When Bradley and his wife Lauren talk about their troubles, the camera is back and steady. Most films will utilize cuts and put the characters in motion. Here, we just watch the actors go to work, sat down.
And as Bradley, in a fit of rage, rips apart a Mitsubishi Eclipse by hand, we linger long enough to feel its rawness clashing with the quiet of the neighborhood, an American flag stone-still on his porch.
Some may shout and scream to get on with it Monty Python and the Holy Grail style. But this isn’t idleness for dwelling’s sake.
No doubt the longer scenes help the film reach its 132-minute runtime, but more is gained through all this kind of hangtime.
We develop a more intimate relationship with our characters. We have time to breathe and think about what’s happening. Then, the shift, after all the pausing, is more effectively jarring when things explode into trouble.
Performances, + 8 Points
To paraphrase, Zahler has said he cast Vince Vaughn in the lead because it would be a transformation for the veteran actor, who usually plays in comedy. The shift would make the character more original. If Zahler cast a veteran actor with experience playing Southern badasses, they might lean on familiar tones of previous roles.
And, oh boy, does Vaughn nail the trick. Bradley is dry, to the point, and darkly responsible. The writing serves him well, and in Vaughn’s hands, the character is difficult not to like.
Thanks to his comedic brand, I forget Vaughn is a tall man with a wide frame.
Watching Vaughn’s Bradley turn to madness for his greater good is darkly magic. We can see an actor pretending to be a man pretending to be a badder man than he is. It’s not easy, but Vaughn gets there.
The thin frame of Jennifer Carpenter against the 6′ 5″ Vaughn is like a tower with a soft spot for a pixie. And she finds an in-this-shit-storm-together chemistry with Vaughn that’s moving.
Then there’s Mr. Miami Vice himself, Don Johnson, who performs brilliantly as the sinister cigar-chomping Warden Tuggs.
Zahler cited Johnson’s ability as he….” does a fantastic job bringing this character to life as someone who handles different people as an animal handler would handle different animals.”
Stoic in the face of awful, Tuggs will dominate inmates into submission, employing methods, as he puts it, Amnesty International would frown on.
And watch out for a chilling Udo Kier as Eleazar’s unconscionable henchman (that dynamite German actor you know you’ve seen in that thing you can’t name).
Hard Turns, +4 Points
Zahler has said his writing process is to surprise himself every day. And Brawl’s script lives up to the goal.
The film’s game is gliding along until a sudden “oh, shit” moment pops in, be it an “ouch”-worthy fistfight or a plot twist that hits in the guts.
You wonder if Bradley and Lauren fell in love at an AA meeting. Their romance is moving thanks to its support and acceptance. Flawed yet with honor, up to no good, it’s like they were pulled under the law and couldn’t find a better way of life to get out.
With the cross tattooed on the back of his head, Bradley suffers like a Jesus figure. But this faith leader deals in blood debts over forgiveness.
Bradley is a moral man with a pockmarked past. You could imagine him pulling his car over to help a motorist change a tire, then driving off to finish a drug deal.
Self-aware, he meets his trying circumstances with illegal decisions. He’d like to stay on the straight path, but he’d rather assist in a drug-dealing operation than struggle to provide for his wife.
And it’s a textbook thriller. The film has a clear premise with plenty at stake and that essential ticking clock.
Dialogue, +2 Points
Zahler’s theatrical dialogue keeps it fresh.
There are small, flavorful touches like Bradley calling his baby “the koala” or dishing out some memorable insults.
Bradley monologues about how, despite having a one-in-three chance of blindly finding the real coffee cream and not the artificial substitute from a store’s fridge, he rarely gets that cream on the first try. It’s a little metaphor for Bradley’s life from an unlikely source.
And there’s Leftie’s prison introduction to Bradley. The trustee shows him around and tells him tips like not shying away from letting people know why you’re in prison. As Leftie puts it, if you don’t represent what you did, inmates might fill in the blanks that you’re a child molester or worse and jump you.
It’s one small dialogue that sums up an entire prison’s scary reality for an audience.
Brutality, +2 Points
You know you’re in for tough moments when Zahler himself wondered if he’d gone too far with the film’s violence.
These fights are not for young eyes. Similar to Drive, they use physical gore effects (think smashed heads and split bones).
But while the effects are unrealistic, the depiction is straight. There are few cuts in the action, close-ups, or glossy effects, if any. Action is shot as still and plain as the film’s conversations.
Still, this isn’t gore for gore’s sake. There are some cringeable moments, but without this pain, the movie would be too tame for its trial of endurance to matter.
The Not-As-Good Things:
Minor Nitpicks, -1 Point
Let’s deduct 1 little point for these two pieces.
One, an inmate is named Lefty. I know it’s a criminal name I’ve heard at least once (Al Pacino’s character in Donnie Brasco) and feels like a hundred times. As creative as Zahler is, I thought he could do better.
Two, there’s a scene where Bradley struggles to climb up a pier pole in the water, as it is too slippery for him. I could be wrong, but it looked like Vince Vaughn was just standing in a few feet of water, bending down and pretending to struggle. It lost the illusion. Maybe there wasn’t time or money for a reshoot here, and it had to stay in the film.
Keeping track of this stuff borders on being a bad audience. Still, I list ’em to prove this isn’t a free-praise piece.
Hard to Watch, -0 Points
This is just a warning, not a deduction: The film isn’t base and vulgar for the sake of it. But if you don’t want to feel emotionally challenged, look elsewhere. Zahler works on creative control, and he’s not afraid what an audience will think or what a studio will allow.
Go Watch Brawl in Cell Block 99:
Total Arbitrary Points Score: 20 Points
Brawl in Cell Block 99 smashes cars, faces, and your expectations.
An unfussy thriller, it moves at low speed until erupting into chaotic violence you can’t unsee.
It rides brilliant performances, a solid story, and nifty theatrical dialogue into a devil’s playground of a somewhat good man forced to do more bad than he intended.
An experience more than just a watch, this movie is recommended for all audiences who don’t mind the hard stuff.
Enjoyed this Post?
Thank you so much. If you’d like to get a ping when I have a new article, you can join my newsletter below.
Disclaimer:
This review’s factual information was gathered through online sources, like Wikipedia, IMDB, or interviews. Misrepresentations and errors are possible but unintentional.
Making art is hard. This is a fan’s blog. Any criticisms are meant to be constructive.
