I Can Handle The Nastiness In Brawl In Cell Block 99 But Did It Have To Be So Meandering?

Brawl In Cell Block 99 is a grimy nasty movie, one that finds human beings as simply vehicles to experiment new forms of torment on and I can guarantee you that the features writer/director S. Craig Zahler would take that as a major compliment. He's made a film that's just stacked with depravity, which isn't a bad thing at all inherently, there are movies I absolutely love that are way more grim than this prison-set action film (Au Hasard Balthazar would eat this thing up for breakfast and then go back for seconds). But could it at least be depraved in an interesting way? Could its warped worldview manifest in ways that are actually entertaining instead of frequently meandering?


For Brawl In Cell Block 99, we get to follow Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn), who has such a constant string of bad luck he might as well be Charlie Brown in adult form. First he gets laid off his job, then he finds out his wife, Lauren Thomas (Jennifer Carpenter), is both cheating on him and pregnant with their first child. Bradley decides to take the bold decision of being a driver for drug deals in order to make money for his forthcoming child, which he's able to do for 18 months before he gets arrested after saving some cops from the gunfire of his criminal accomplices. Once he's in prison, his wife is kidnapped by a big cartel leader and he's told he's gotta kill a man located in Cell Block 99 in a maximum security prison if he wants his wife and child to be safe.

In order to get into that maximum security prison, Bradley Thomas has to prove he's a psychotic individual, a task he decides to accomplish by commiting a bunch of violent acts against prison guards and fellow prisoners alike. Despite that being such a crucial part of the plot, I was shocked to see violence is in short supply in Brawl In Cell Block 99. Extended spans of the film go by without so much as a punch being thrown, and while the action scenes, when they finally show up, are decent enough (some gruesome deaths in the climax do hit the bullseye in terms of shock value carnage), they're not enough to stave off the monotonous nature of the production.

Instead, too much of Brawl In Cell Block 99 is devoted to either grotesque imagery (which get less and less impactful as the movie goes on since there's just no surprise to the hideous sights after a while) while we also get a number of dialogue-heavy sequences. Centering a good chunk of the project around dialogue turns out to be a really bad idea since S. Craig Zahler's writing here is lackluster more often than not. Trying to make nearly phrase out of the mouth of the extremely Southern lead character some sort of colloquialism or a wry retort is a really bad idea, most of Bradley Thomas's dialogue just sounds like bad attempts at making memorable dialogue instead of the genuine article.

Vince Vaughn's delivery might have something to do with the lines not hitting their marks too, he feels woefully miscast in this movie. He's not intimidating or convincing in the brutally violent moments and his delivery of the various Southern witticisms of his character never come off as authentic. None of the other actors, save for Udo Kier delivering all of his lines with delightful menace as an antagonist, leave much of an impact too, which may be the ultimate problem with the feature. Lots of the B-movies that Brawl In Cell Block 99 is homaging too had terrible writing as well but the best of them were able to deliver loony performances or memorably over-the-top characters that them fun to watch. By contrast, Brawl In Cell Block 99 has stiff performances and flatly realized characters. Even Don Johnson as a sadistic warden, a seemingly surefire recipe for shlocky goodness, doesn't get to do much.

Worst of all, the movies shot pretty terribly, the camerawork is frequently amateurish and a number of early scenes are coated in garish blue color grading. Worst of all, bad lighting means scenes set in either exterior nighttime locales or dimly lit rooms are visually incoherent to watch and not in a way that comes off as an intentional choice. At least the far too few fight scenes are rendered nicely in wide shots that allow Bradley's brutal physical actions to be seen clearly, but none of them are anywhere good enough to compensate for the rest of the film. Brawl In Cell Block 99 has nastiness in spades, but it doesn't have much else to its name and that means it very quickly becomes like a Sonic cheeseburger; not all that fun to experience and it leaves a bad aftertaste in your mouth.