S. Craig Zahler’s follow-up to his blood-soaked western debut Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, is one of the most underrated action movies in recent memory. It’s a pulpy throwback to old exploitation revenge movies, but with a gritty, realistic edge. A tough-as-nails Vince Vaughn beats and gouges his way through the guards and protected inmates of a dingy underground prison block, paving the way for some of the gnarliest violence ever put on film. It’s a must-see for fans of the action genre, especially the grisly subset of ultraviolent action movies that’s emerged in recent years.
Back in the days of Swingers and Wedding Crashers, no one could’ve predicted that Vince Vaughn had the depth to go to the dark places he goes to in Brawl in Cell Block 99. Having proven his ability to play a convincing tough guy in True Detective, Vaughn took this darker persona to another level in Brawl in Cell Block 99. Bradley Thomas is introduced as a retired boxer and ex-con who can’t hold down a job or keep his cool. As he punches his way to the bottom of the prison system, he reveals the extent of the dark side he had to conceal as a civilian. And the audience roots for him every step of the way, because he has a noble cause and the bad guys are even worse.
Not only is the first act of Brawl in Cell Block 99 swift and efficient in delivering all the necessary exposition before getting to the fighting; it sets up stakes and conflicts that add a layer of urgency and emotional engagement to the fight scenes. Bradley is driven back to a life of crime to support his pregnant wife. He gets caught on the job and makes peace with the fact that he’ll be behind bars for the first few years of his child’s life. That seems like rock bottom. Then, he’s visited by a crime boss who orders him to kill a rival gangster who’s locked in a completely different prison under threat of performing an experimental abortion procedure on his wife. Suddenly, rock bottom gets a lot lower.
Bradley is faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of getting himself transferred to the dingiest, dirtiest prison in the state, then getting taken to the grimy underground cell block his target is in, then getting to his target’s extra-secure cell and killing him. Every step of the way, Bradley is forced into rough-and-tumble combat situations. The script’s deceptively simplistic plotting and clear-cut heroes, villains, and stakes ensure the story is compelling without getting in the way of the action.
A niche subgenre has risen up in action cinema in the past few years marked by gruesome ultraviolence bordering on the horrific. The most mainstream example is John Wick, but lesser-known gems like The Raid and The Night Comes for Us have even bloodier fight scenes. This subgenre is seemingly a response to the audience’s increasing desensitization to on-screen violence in a saturated market. After watching the hallway scene in Oldboy, action movie fans became a lot harder to impress. The head-stomping, skull-scraping brutality of Brawl in Cell Block 99 has the capacity to shock anyone, no matter how desensitized they are – it goes as far as the most violent movies ever made, then takes it a step further.
The messy fight choreography offers a more realistic, spontaneous counterpoint to the rhythmic brawls of the John Wick series, but its rougher fight scenes have just as much intensity. If anything, Brawl’s bumbling fight choreography is even more intense than the average action movie, because the hero isn’t invincible. Where characters like Baba Yaga and Bryan Mills are so hypercompetent that they never seem to be in any real danger, Bradley takes his fair share of beatings in this movie. For a long stretch in the second act, he’s fitted with a stun belt, so he’s basically defenseless. It doesn’t seem a given that he’ll succeed; the main reason the audience roots for him is that, unlike Ethan Hunt, he might actually fail.
Vaughn is backed up by some fantastic supporting performances, including Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter as Bradley’s wife and Don Johnson as a sadistic prison warden who likes to dole out experimental punishments on inmates and takes an immediate dislike to Bradley. While the torso-shredding antics of Zahler’s debut feature Bone Tomahawk introduced moviegoers to the director’s knack for jaw-dropping violence, Brawl in Cell Block 99 perfected the filmmaker’s peculiar brand of grindhouse thrills.
Any action movie fan who’s become disillusioned with the sanitized violence in Hollywood’s endless slew of PG-13 blockbusters should check out Brawl in Cell Block 99. With pitch-perfect pacing, a revelatory turn from Vaughn, and an abundance of truly hard-hitting fight scenes, it’s a masterclass in action-driven storytelling and filmmaking.