Brawl in Cell Block 99 (18.)
Directed by S. Craig Zahler.
Starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Tom Guiry, Marc Blucas and Udo Kier. 132 mins. Out on Blu-ray/ DVD on Boxing Day.
He's just two films in but writer/ director S. Craig Zahler already seems to have his act down cold: slow, almost meditative dramas, nominally thrillers but not really played for tension, punctuated by moments of eye-popping violence (not quite literally, but surely only a matter of time.) This and previous film Bone Tomahawk are surely the most placid and serene prison/ cowboys vs cannibalistic natives dramas you could imagine.
Zahler may have found his perfect lead character in Bradley Thomas (Vaughn), a recovering alcoholic and mechanic who is trying to live right. He's a brute of a man who has learned to express his anger in short, regulated bursts. When he comes home and learns that his wife (Carpenter) has been having an affair he calmly tells her to go into the house while he methodically, but brutally, smashes up her car with his bare fists. He's a concise but eloquent talker, delivering only deadpan witticisms. He is the Hulk, who retains Bruce Banner's personality.
It's a good title but Zahler's slow burn style means that the inevitability of incarceration hangs over the first hour. You can't have a film with a prison title that then takes nearly half its running time getting our protagonist into that prison. I can see that Zahler has a distinct and special talent but I couldn't quite get with the programme this time out. Firstly, spoiler, it has a pregnant woman being kidnapped and held hostage which is cheap in my book and just sucks any pleasure I might get from the endeavour.
Both Zahler's films have been descents into savagery, but also descents into fantasy. They move from a realistic and rational, if still very violent, reality into something exaggerated and absurd. Bradley starts his period of incarceration in a realistic contemporary prison, but by the end has been transferred to a gothic hellhole, with plumbing to match.
So I didn't buy into Bradley's existential plight, nor Vince Vaughn's career reinvention. It's smart that someone finally got to make use of his physical presence, 6' 5", and got him to find an effective new style of comic delivery. But he felt somehow detached from it all, exemplified perhaps by the way his punches don't seem to connect.
Directed by S. Craig Zahler.
Starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Tom Guiry, Marc Blucas and Udo Kier. 132 mins. Out on Blu-ray/ DVD on Boxing Day.
He's just two films in but writer/ director S. Craig Zahler already seems to have his act down cold: slow, almost meditative dramas, nominally thrillers but not really played for tension, punctuated by moments of eye-popping violence (not quite literally, but surely only a matter of time.) This and previous film Bone Tomahawk are surely the most placid and serene prison/ cowboys vs cannibalistic natives dramas you could imagine.
Zahler may have found his perfect lead character in Bradley Thomas (Vaughn), a recovering alcoholic and mechanic who is trying to live right. He's a brute of a man who has learned to express his anger in short, regulated bursts. When he comes home and learns that his wife (Carpenter) has been having an affair he calmly tells her to go into the house while he methodically, but brutally, smashes up her car with his bare fists. He's a concise but eloquent talker, delivering only deadpan witticisms. He is the Hulk, who retains Bruce Banner's personality.
It's a good title but Zahler's slow burn style means that the inevitability of incarceration hangs over the first hour. You can't have a film with a prison title that then takes nearly half its running time getting our protagonist into that prison. I can see that Zahler has a distinct and special talent but I couldn't quite get with the programme this time out. Firstly, spoiler, it has a pregnant woman being kidnapped and held hostage which is cheap in my book and just sucks any pleasure I might get from the endeavour.
Both Zahler's films have been descents into savagery, but also descents into fantasy. They move from a realistic and rational, if still very violent, reality into something exaggerated and absurd. Bradley starts his period of incarceration in a realistic contemporary prison, but by the end has been transferred to a gothic hellhole, with plumbing to match.
So I didn't buy into Bradley's existential plight, nor Vince Vaughn's career reinvention. It's smart that someone finally got to make use of his physical presence, 6' 5", and got him to find an effective new style of comic delivery. But he felt somehow detached from it all, exemplified perhaps by the way his punches don't seem to connect.
