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
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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
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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,