Review: Brawl in Cell Block 99

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (18)

USA 2017 132 mins Dir: S. Craig Zahler Cast: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Vince Vaughn, Don Johnson, Tom Guiry, Marc Blucas, Udo Kier

Vince Vaughn’s career-defying turn as a merciless convict with a strict moral code can’t save this plodding monument to exploitation cinema, from the team behind Bone Tomahawk.

Director S. Craig Zahler turns the head-stomping violence up to 11 in his second feature, delivering a film that feels like an adaptation of the 1980’s arcade videogame brawler Final Fight with its plodding level-by-level story progression and two-dimensional characters.

The film begins with Bradley Thomas (Vaughn) arriving home early after losing his job as a tow truck driver, to discover that his wife (Jennifer Carpenter) has been cheating on him. His reaction is to order her inside their home before he takes out his fury on her car – a sequence straight out of a Street Fighter 2 bonus level. The camera lingers on Vaughn as he chillingly dismembers his wife’s car whilst we are left worrying about what awaits her when he is finished. This scene closes with a shot of Vaughn tossing the hood of the car into the street which seems to be played for laughs, but anyone who found Bone Tomahawk‘s racial politics troubling will find much to dislike about the exploitation of Carpenter’s character here and throughout Cell Block 99.

We then skip forward 18 months to find that Bradley (not Brad) has risen to the position of Chief Muscle for a local drug dealer, his talents at bone crushing matched by a sort of clairvoyant ability to sense which unsavoury characters intend to betray the crew. The inevitable drug deal goes wrong landing Thomas with a choice of selling out his boss or facing considerable time in the Big House. The script repeatedly informs us that this is A Man With A Code (“I’d rather knit baby booties out of pink yarn than hit someone who didn’t deserve it”) so it’s little surprise that he stoically chooses prison. Oh yeah, and his wife is heavily pregnant. Did I forget to mention that?

Once inside we are told that there are various peaceful ways that Bradley could pass his time, but any hope of joining the knitting circle is ended by the arrival of Udo Kier’s creepy Placid Man (as he is credited) who informs Bradley that his still-pregnant wife has been kidnapped and threatened with a violence too stomach-churning to be repeated here. Bradley must find a way to reach and kill an inmate on the maximum security Cell Block 99, in a different prison, if she is to be released.

Half-expecting LEVEL ONE to appear on screen at this point, any sense of suspense is soon wiped out as we witness Vaughn’s seemingly invincible hulk progress through escalating levels of prison security, crushing those who stand in his way, in order to reach the titular Cell Block 99 where the final boss awaits. I wonder if the ticket price is equivalent to the number of 10p pieces that must be shovelled into the arcade machine by sweaty teenage hands to reach the same conclusion.

Despite all this, there is some skill on display here. What should be credibility-shattering violence retains its power thanks to Zahler’s skill with shooting practical effects, producing some of the most memorably audible groans I have ever witnessed in a cinema. Likewise there are some laughs, even if they do feel a bit jarring in a film that labours to be taken seriously. Unfortunately both the action and humour are spread so thinly that they cannot have a hope of sustaining the bruising 127 minute runtime.