BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (18)
★★★★
WRITER-DIRECTOR S Craig Zahler made waves last year with his brutal directorial debut Bone Tomahawk. He follows that up with this equally audacious and shockingly violent crime saga that features a truly show-stopping performance by Vince Vaughn.
Vaughn plays Bradley Thomas, a former boxer who has been trying to live on the straight and narrow with his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter). When he gets laid off from his job as a mechanic, he turns to his old life of crime by becoming a drug runner for mob boss Gil (Marc Blucas). When an important drop-off goes wrong, Bradley is sentenced to seven years in jail.
In prison he is threatened by the enemies of his boss who lost money on that wayward drug deal and who have kidnapped his heavily pregnant wife as leverage. He must orchestrate a way to get himself transferred to another, far more dangerous prison in order to kill a specific inmate.
Vaughn has undergone a career transformation far removed from the comedic days of Wedding Crashers and Dodgeball. He proves himself a force to be reckoned with here, commanding every bit of attention with primal power and bubbling-under-the-surface threat.
He’s like an imposing planet around which everything else revolves, a lot of the time using his domineering size, menacing charisma and shaven, tattooed head to do the talking.
Vaughn’s character is at the heart of a tensely protracted tale that upends conventions to play by its own rules. Zahler isn’t interested in traditional prison drama tropes but sends us down a far more unique, almost surreal path in which our central character is forced to unleash his inner savage to save a loved-one from a horrible fate. It can be looked at as an exploration of entrenched masculinity and humanity’s inherent need to be violent, or enjoyed purely as a glorious piece of pulpy grindhouse cinema.
We have here impressively methodical filmmaking broiling with tension, steadily building and expanding its scope of brutal violence until we land at the titular punch-up which will have even the most hardened of cinemagoers wincing where they sit. Zahler’s brand of matter-of-fact violence makes its impact all the more powerful. This is relentless, uncompromising, tough-as-nails cinema that leaves us in no doubt that its director is the real deal.
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