Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, 2017)

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, 2017)

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Mar 26, 2018 5:50 pm

Brawl in Cell Block 99, S. Craig Zahler's follow-up to the Western horror Bone Tomahawk, further establishes his commitment to slow-burn, dialogue-heavy, and ultra-violent genre material. As noted elsewhere, Vince Vaughn gives a solid against-type performance as a good ol' Southern boy with a dry sense of humor, a strong urge to provide for his family, and a knack for shattering limbs and crushing skulls when necessary. Along with Vaughn, there are enough supporting cast members - from Udo Kier to Don Johnson - having fun (or at least this movie's version of fun) that it almost counterbalances Zahler's wholesale commitment to unrelenting somberness and extreme brutality. Jennifer Carpenter, who I don't believe I had seen anywhere else besides the early seasons of Dexter, was much better here as Vaughn's wife than she ever was on that show, particularly in her first scene with him after his first outburst of violence.

Zahler's approach of applying some of the trappings of serious dramatic cinema (especially pacing, both within scenes and the film as a whole) to hardcore exploitation material could in theory take the sharper edges off of both and make for something tonally closer to Cronenberg, but Zahler somehow combines those elements in a way that heightens them both and accentuates the lack of either a sense of humor or arch remove toward the material that could make material like this more palatable. Perhaps the absurdity of each escalation in the awfulness of Vaughn's situation (and the subsequent escalation in the brutality of his response) is meant to be darkly humorous, but it's hard to chuckle even out of shocked incredulity at
DisturbingShow
a credible threat to dismember a fetus in utero while keeping it alive to term, for example.

I didn't dislike it overall, but - appropriately, I suppose, because it is a prison movie - it is substantially more claustrophobic and oppressive than the already pretty dour Bone Tomahawk, and without some of the same scattered moments of charm or quirk that made Zahler's western feel more character-driven and engaging; I'm willing to give Zahler's next (Dragged Across Concrete, a police thriller with Vaughn and Carpenter again as well as Mel Gibson) a chance as well, but if it represents another doubling down on grimness and extreme gore as Brawn did relative to Bone Tomahawk, that will be as far as I can go following this particular filmography.

That said, I will give credit to Zahler and Brawl for treating its particular forms of savagery with a seriousness that something more conventionally enjoyable and slickly violent like the John Wick films can't muster when ubiquitous killing is presented with all the consequences and import of a video game: a character appears for two seconds, poses a threat, the antihero responds resulting in a puff of digital red blood to the head, and the character falls to the ground to be immediately forgotten by all other characters and the audience. Here, when
GrossShow
an unconscious villain's head is smashed into and ground against a concrete floor until all the skin on his face is peeled away to the bone, while he is still alive,
it may be pornographic and sickening, but watching it somehow doesn't feel as insidious as knowing I saw Keanu Reeves gun down literally hundreds of people one by one for two hours but not being able to recall feeling any response at all other than, for maybe one shooting out of twenty: "Oh, that one was cool."

User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: The Films of 2017

#2 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Mar 26, 2018 6:59 pm

Personal side note: I happened to click over to the User Control Panel for a PM and noticed that the above Brawl in Cell Block 99 post was my 1000th post on this forum. If I'd realized beforehand I might have tried to ensure I was posting some 1,000+ word appreciation of a Hitchcock or Kurosawa, but at least it wasn't the lame joke in an Infighting thread that was my 1001st post a few minutes later.

User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, 2017)

#3 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:41 pm

(Some moderate spoilers below):
colinr0380 wrote:
Sun Nov 03, 2019 10:20 am
___
Brawl in Cell Block 99
So from annoying female characters, we move to annoying male ones. I had heard good things about this film featuring a 'heavy hitting' performance by Vince Vaughn, but was left seriously underwhelmed by this. Everything felt 'half way there', in that the action felt limp and unimpactful until (almost) the very end.

I really did not like the way the film approached its main character either, in a way that almost idolised him. He's laid off from his mechanic job in the first scene (so 'The Man' has beaten him down) and comes home early to find his wife about to leave to cheat on him. He naturally responds by ordering her to give him her phone and get out of the car and back in the house whilst he proceeds to work off some anger by methodically dismantling her car on the front lawn (I guess he knows how because they have established that he is a mechanic now?). This is in no way portrayed as coercive or intimidating but the natural response of a powerful man to having been cuckolded. Luckily his wife apologises profusely for having cheated on him, and that she was only doing it because he was so distant after she had a miscarriage and she thought that he was having an affair himself (so really it was implied to have been all her fault? I guess?)

Anyway it all ends happily with her calling off the affair and reaffirming her love for him, whilst he insists that she get pregnant as soon as possible so they have something in their lives to keep together for, I guess. We jump 'eighteen months later' and our 'hero' is working as a drugs courier, graciously declining prostitutes offering freebies for some of the drugs (but its really because Vince Vaughn is apparently so sexily irresistible? Even the prison guards in the first minimum security prison are turned on by how 'big' he is when he has to strip for them and are taking guesses at how tall this Adonis of a man is at one point when he sullenly clumps past them after receiving some bad news from a prison visitor), but unfortunately he gets involved in a drug deal gone south (and acts like a petulant child anyway, given he forces one of his companions to give up his gun and throws it away, then tries to throw the drug money they have just scuba dived for back into the lake, which is far overstepping his bounds!), even shooting one of his own side in the standoff with the cops, which quite frankly left me siding with the ostensible bad guys that he was right to have to have to pay for his bad behaviour!

(Also that confrontation between cops and criminals scene has to have the limpest version of someone throwing a grenade underneath a policecar and it going off with a small puff of smoke that I have ever seen! The hilarity of how unimpressive it is only underlined even more by the character cockily saying just before throwing the grenade to "get ready for another 9/11!". Oof, how edgy and dangerous!)

So post-shootout, our main character and his bizarre moral code results in him accepting to go to prison for four to five years for his part in the shootout (whilst his now adoring wife says that she will always be there for him and when he says he doesn't want either her or his child visiting so they do not have memories of him in prison, she looks at him with undisguised awe and wonder at just how amazing a man he actually is, and obviously how lucky she was to have seen that before it was too late!), but unfortunately things do not end there as he gets a visit from one of the associates of the bad guy he wronged (in a wonderfully menacing cameo by Udo Kier, which immediately makes the film more interesting than it has any right to be), to tell him that they have kidnapped his wife and will get a practiced abortionist in to do horrible mutilations to their unborn child in utero if he does not put himself in a maximum security prison and kill someone on their behalf.

Much of the rest of the film is the main good ol' boy character getting involved in weirdly limp and poorly choreographed fights that he intentionally loses (because he's such a man that if he intended to win the fight then dagnabbit he would have done so!), going from a minimum security prison to a maximum security one, to an extra naughty boy cell block 99 that is where the guards can torture the most degenerate prisoners with impunity, all whilst playing weird sub-dom games with Don Johnson's sadistic warden and various guards (this is something that, if the film had a bit more nerve, could really have pushed into eye-popping areas. But like everything else its done in the most limp and half-hearted manner possible. We see torture chairs and implements neatly laid out, but only get an electric shock belt and Vaughn doubling over each time someone presses a button as the main torture effect.

Eventually the tables get turned and our lead gets to dole out some vengeance Tarantino-style, and the violence goes from less than impressive to suddenly featuring heads getting burst open and eyes being gouged out with bare hands. One extreme to the other really, but even this brief amount of gore is too little too late. Though that sudden turn into prosthetic gore effects really made me think that this is a film that thinks it is trying to be Riki-Oh (NSFW), but it pulls its punches far too much to be anywhere near the same league.

That was in no way helped by Vaughn's performance which goes beyond stoic gruffness but with a sense of humanity buried deep within into just seeming one note monotonous. There is a fine line I suppose, but for me this went from 'underplayed' to 'not played at all'! Maybe I have just been spoiled by spending six months watching the Fist of the North Star series which actually has a stoic, almost blank, main character but with occasional flashes of actual humanity deep beneath the surface to really be impressed by a character to whom every single situation is just met with no response at all! Its like the actor and the film know that stoicism is cool and manly, but don't know how to pull that minimalist response of a character off with charisma too.

So maybe watch the film for Udo Kier's scenes (in a few short appearances he manages to put across a sense of menace and threat of obscene horror that makes every other character seem childishly posturing over how 'badass' they are! He also gets a fun death scene, where he is kind of cruelly betrayed by the heroine for having actually having had the nerve to have held up his side of the bargain in the hostage swap!). Don Johnson is nearly there in the menacing stakes too (but really is doing a reprise of his Django Unchained part in many ways). But really nothing in this film can in any way compare to Riki-Oh, or even Stuart Gordon's Fortress (which similarly does maximum security sub-dom gore-fest antics in ultraviolent form, along with having a similar subplot about the pregnant heroine being menaced which actually treats her as a character in her own right), which are far better and not as frustratingly half-hearted about their content.
___
Colin, have you seen either of Zahler's other films (Bone Tomahawk or Dragged Across Concrete)? I can sympathize with anyone being put off by any of them individually, but I find that they've grown on me more and more as I've seen each succeeding entry. Their decidedly weird blend of genre subversion and experimentation, off-putting and provocative exploitation-film content, and commitment to deliberate pacing somehow overcome the sometimes stilted writing and simplistic characterizations for me, and I find myself thinking about them more often than my initial reactions would seem to warrant.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, 2017)

#4 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Nov 11, 2019 6:02 pm

Thanks for moving this across. I have Bone Tomahawk in my to watch pile but have not reached it as yet. I'm a little bit worried to now, but I should at least give that one a chance. Not least because Kurt Russell can make any film worth watching!

Regarding Brawl In Cell Block 99, it might also be worth noting that in that early "eighteen months later" jump from the main character being fired and finding his wife cheating and their reconciliation along with his declaration that he is going to be going into drug dealing to make ends meet, that the drug dealing has apparently moved them both to a much bigger and fancier house with all the mod cons and even a room dedicated as a nursery! I'm not sure if it was meant to intentionally mean anything (though it feels that way), but there is a kind of pointed implication there that the straight and narrow mechanic job was driving our hero's life and relationship into the ground and being fired and having to become a drug dealer might have been the best thing that happened to him! (Turning him from going down the potentially abusive husband route into instead channelling his self-destructive urges towards a martyrdom purpose!) Even to the wife, despite some of the trials and threats she ended up having to endure as a consequence of her partner's decisions!

I suppose that actually might be the (slightly disturbing) message of the film, that even some of the most horrendous experiences can be worthwhile if they elevate you into being a heroic saviour figure (or an action heroine), whilst the straightforwardly mundane day-to-day grind just ends up crushing everyone's spirit (weirdly its a bit like The Incredibles in that sense!)

Post Reply