Jim LaFleur

One star is a gift, a big one. Five minutes into Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) I wondered if Vince Vaughn had lost a bet. Ten minutes in, I was pretty sure he had. Fifteen minutes into the film, I was positive he had lost a bet, AND someone had compromising pictures. Screen Writer & Director, S. Craig Zahler (you know Czar from Air Guitar Nation) wanted to deliver a grisly prison action/drama depicting the harrowing fall of former boxer Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughan). This moving is not that… at all… in any way… at any point. The movie is a collection of adolescent “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if this happened” moments tied together with an illogical, irrational, unbelievable script. It appears to have been inspired after the community standards control in the “Prison Tycoon 4: Supermax” video game froze Zahler’s account. It is the only rational answer. Afterward, I laid awake in bed straining to come up with the reason, any reason, a studio would greenlight this prison dumpster fire of a movie. Night became day, and I’ve got nothing… The actual movie is only about 30 minutes long with the rest of the 2-hour, 12-minute running time consumed with long walks (Vaughn absolutely gets 10,000 steps in), pensive stares into the middle distance, and excruciatingly bad fight scenes. I give Vaughn credit for doing his own stunts, but Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” music video has more realistic fight choreography. However, the true descent into madness comes when Thomas is transferred from a medium security prison to the Max Security “Minimum Freedom”, Red Leaf Prison, where he meets Warden Tuggs, played by a disinterested Don Johnson. In this role, Johnson proves he can memorize words typed out on paper and deliver them with all the heartfelt conviction of a narcoleptic in a coma. The story goes from “unbelievable” to “are you trying to insult me?” almost immediately, and ends in a such a spectacularly unbelievable way, my subconscious is actively rejecting it trying to protect my higher brain functions. Thanks, Dom. Great suggestion.