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colinr0380 wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2019 2:20 pm ___
Brawl in Cell Block 99
So from annoying female characters, we move to annoying male ones. I had heard good things about this film featuring a 'heavy hitting' performance by Vince Vaughn, but was left seriously underwhelmed by this. Everything felt 'half way there', in that the action felt limp and unimpactful until (almost) the very end.

I really did not like the way the film approached its main character either, in a way that almost idolised him. He's laid off from his mechanic job in the first scene (so 'The Man' has beaten him down) and comes home early to find his wife about to leave to cheat on him. He naturally responds by ordering her to give him her phone and get out of the car and back in the house whilst he proceeds to work off some anger by methodically dismantling her car on the front lawn (I guess he knows how because they have established that he is a mechanic now?). This is in no way portrayed as coercive or intimidating but the natural response of a powerful man to having been cuckolded. Luckily his wife apologises profusely for having cheated on him, and that she was only doing it because he was so distant after she had a miscarriage and she thought that he was having an affair himself (so really it was implied to have been all her fault? I guess?)

Anyway it all ends happily with her calling off the affair and reaffirming her love for him, whilst he insists that she get pregnant as soon as possible so they have something in their lives to keep together for, I guess. We jump 'eighteen months later' and our 'hero' is working as a drugs courier, graciously declining prostitutes offering freebies for some of the drugs (but its really because Vince Vaughn is apparently so sexily irresistible? Even the prison guards in the first minimum security prison are turned on by how 'big' he is when he has to strip for them and are taking guesses at how tall this Adonis of a man is at one point when he sullenly clumps past them after receiving some bad news from a prison visitor), but unfortunately he gets involved in a drug deal gone south (and acts like a petulant child anyway, given he forces one of his companions to give up his gun and throws it away, then tries to throw the drug money they have just scuba dived for back into the lake, which is far overstepping his bounds!), even shooting one of his own side in the standoff with the cops, which quite frankly left me siding with the ostensible bad guys that he was right to have to have to pay for his bad behaviour!

(Also that confrontation between cops and criminals scene has to have the limpest version of someone throwing a grenade underneath a policecar and it going off with a small puff of smoke that I have ever seen! The hilarity of how unimpressive it is only underlined even more by the character cockily saying just before throwing the grenade to "get ready for another 9/11!". Oof, how edgy and dangerous!)

So post-shootout, our main character and his bizarre moral code results in him accepting to go to prison for four to five years for his part in the shootout (whilst his now adoring wife says that she will always be there for him and when he says he doesn't want either her or his child visiting so they do not have memories of him in prison, she looks at him with undisguised awe and wonder at just how amazing a man he actually is, and obviously how lucky she was to have seen that before it was too late!), but unfortunately things do not end there as he gets a visit from one of the associates of the bad guy he wronged (in a wonderfully menacing cameo by Udo Kier, which immediately makes the film more interesting than it has any right to be), to tell him that they have kidnapped his wife and will get a practiced abortionist in to do horrible mutilations to their unborn child in utero if he does not put himself in a maximum security prison and kill someone on their behalf.

Much of the rest of the film is the main good ol' boy character getting involved in weirdly limp and poorly choreographed fights that he intentionally loses (because he's such a man that if he intended to win the fight then dagnabbit he would have done so!), going from a minimum security prison to a maximum security one, to an extra naughty boy cell block 99 that is where the guards can torture the most degenerate prisoners with impunity, all whilst playing weird sub-dom games with Don Johnson's sadistic warden and various guards (this is something that, if the film had a bit more nerve, could really have pushed into eye-popping areas. But like everything else its done in the most limp and half-hearted manner possible. We see torture chairs and implements neatly laid out, but only get an electric shock belt and Vaughn doubling over each time someone presses a button as the main torture effect.

Eventually the tables get turned and our lead gets to dole out some vengeance Tarantino-style, and the violence goes from less than impressive to suddenly featuring heads getting burst open and eyes being gouged out with bare hands. One extreme to the other really, but even this brief amount of gore is too little too late. Though that sudden turn into prosthetic gore effects really made me think that this is a film that thinks it is trying to be Riki-Oh (NSFW), but it pulls its punches far too much to be anywhere near the same league.

That was in no way helped by Vaughn's performance which goes beyond stoic gruffness but with a sense of humanity buried deep within into just seeming one note monotonous. There is a fine line I suppose, but for me this went from 'underplayed' to 'not played at all'! Maybe I have just been spoiled by spending six months watching the Fist of the North Star series which actually has a stoic, almost blank, main character but with occasional flashes of actual humanity deep beneath the surface to really be impressed by a character to whom every single situation is just met with no response at all! Its like the actor and the film know that stoicism is cool and manly, but don't know how to pull that minimalist response of a character off with charisma too.

So maybe watch the film for Udo Kier's scenes (in a few short appearances he manages to put across a sense of menace and threat of obscene horror that makes every other character seem childishly posturing over how 'badass' they are! He also gets a fun death scene, where he is kind of cruelly betrayed by the heroine for having actually having had the nerve to have held up his side of the bargain in the hostage swap!). Don Johnson is nearly there in the menacing stakes too (but really is doing a reprise of his Django Unchained part in many ways). But really nothing in this film can in any way compare to Riki-Oh, or even Stuart Gordon's Fortress (which similarly does maximum security sub-dom gore-fest antics in ultraviolent form, along with having a similar subplot about the pregnant heroine being menaced which actually treats her as a character in her own right), which are far better and not as frustratingly half-hearted about their content.
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