In the Flesh: Brawl in Cell Block 99

Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughan) is a piece of shit. In the first few minutes we know the man we watch as he surveils and terrorizes his wife, Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter), bloodying his hands in the act of tearing her car apart after she reveals she’s been seeing another man. Throughout Brawl in Cell Block 99 we watch him savage person after person as he chews his way through the prison system, pausing along the way to dispense racist provocations. In a way it’s a familiar format, the sort of thing you’d see in a latter-day Liam Neeson joint. A family man forced by blackmail to do the very worst things imaginable. The twist here is that Bradley doesn’t seem to care all that much about the brutality of it. He quietly beats, shanks, mutilates, and curb-stomps prisoner after prisoner, guard after guard, and it’s only when it becomes apparent that his entire reason for engineering his own descent through the prison system is an elaborately orchestrated fakeout meant to put him where his enemies can get at him personally that the least bit of emotion starts to crack his violent husk. Even then, he throws caution to the wind and gambles his pregnant wife and unborn child’s lives in order to exert control over the situation.

It’s interesting to watch a repellent man (Vaughan) playing a repellent character in violent conflict with an even more repellent system (prison). Some people, mostly right-wingers and fascists, consider director S. Craig Zahler a right-wing or fascist filmmaker, but it seems clear enough that what he’s drawn to creatively is the people who live steeped in these ideologies and worldviews. His presentation of right-wing-inflected violence is so blunt and so unequivocal that there’s no room to hide in subtext or ambiguity. Here is a racist, violent, controlling man, a parasitic drug runner, who has carte blanche to do anything and everything to the Mexican gangsters who have kidnapped his wife. The gangsters even bring in a Korean abortionist (Tobee Paik) and threaten to have the man snip the limbs off the fetus developing inside Lauren, an almost cartoonishly racially and politically charged intersection of fascist anxieties. This isn’t triumphalist suburban dad fantasy hour in the mold of Breakdown or Taken, it’s something much nastier, and much more honest.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Vaughan’s ogreish physique used as well as Zahler uses it here. He doesn’t beat people to death as much as disassemble them the same way he does his wife’s car, snapping limbs and stomping in skulls with relentless efficiency. Another prisoner even comments on it explicitly from offscreen during the film’s prolonged final action sequence. He towers over his co-stars, a dead-eyed golem systematically tearing through as much flesh as he can get his hands on. Like all Zahler’s work the futility of the violence is deeply central to the film. Bradley is fighting his way to a man who doesn’t exist so that people who screwed him over can project their own monumental screwup onto him and his family. He kills them. Warden Tuggs (Don Johnson) kills him. Like the stygian depths of Redleaf Penitentiary’s titular cell block 99, a hellish and extremely illegal torture labyrinth buried beneath the prison proper, it’s a horror that exists because people want it to exist, because we long for the opportunity to destroy ourselves and each other. Whether it’s human nature or pure inhumanity is beside the point entirely. It’s real, and it’s hungry.