S. Craig Zahler's Brawl in Cell Block 99 is overly morbid, like his debut Bone Tomahawk, but has enough interesting moments to make it a diverting B picture. It has enough material for ninety minutes, but, unfortunately, has been inflated to over two hours. Zahler dawdles over his introductory sequences which present Vince Vaughn as a troubled and violent misfit who resorts to working as a drug courier to build a better life for himself and his wife. Vaughn's twang signals that this is a hillbilly elegy for the Trumpian blue collar underbelly left for dead by economic circumstance and awash in meth and opiates, much like Jean-Francois Richet's Blood Father.
Vaughn proves to be an effectively steely center for the film. He gives an unflappable performance of stoic machismo that recalls Clint Eastwood. Jennifer Carpenter as his femme doesn't register as much, probably because she is tied to a chair for much of the movie and it is that kind of movie. However, Zahler invests more effort in characterizations than most B directors and he provides Willie C. Carpenter, Mustafa Shakir and Udo Kier a chance to give dimensionality to what would be stock characters in a more routine flick.
Zahler's plotting and conception of the American penal system are ludicrous. By the time Don Johnson (channeling Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) arrives on screen as the warden of a torture chamber disguised as a maximum security prison, most viewers will be unable to suspend their disbelief. Benji Bakshi's overexposed photography does not help much, but Zahler's commitment to his crazed material won me over. Juxtaposing Vaughn lit by a hellish orange glow in prison with his wife safe in the verdant paradise of suburbia showed me that Zahler is willing to use exploitive material for a grander design. Brawl in Cell Block 99, like Bone Tomahawk, shows that Zahler is a better than average genre filmmaker, but it remains to be seen if he can transcend his tawdry material. (2/22/18)
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