The Film Buffa Reviews: Vince Vaughn in ‘Brawl in Cell Block 99’ is unlike anything he’s ever done

One of the most visceral action films in the past ten years is streaming on Netflix.

At the beginning of Craig S. Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99, audiences meet Bradley “not Brad” Thomas during the worst week of his life. Laid off from his day job, the former boxer turned job-to-job type finds out his girlfriend (Jennifer Carpenter) cheated on him. Oh, and she’s pregnant. Pulled back into a world of crime to make money for his growing family, a drug run gone wrong lands him in prison, a decrepit place nicknamed “The Fridge.”

Played by Vince Vaughn, Bradley is a guy stocked full of rage and strength, someone who beats the piss out of a car instead of beating up his woman. Placed in a cell, the first thing he does is tests the strength of the concrete wall with a small punch. His world is further rocked when his girlfriend is kidnapped, and he’s forced to take out a fellow inmate.

The only problem is that guy is in a much worse prison. As Don Johnson’s warden puts it, the maximum security location is basically “minimum freedom.” Bradley will have to fight his way down to cell block 99, and I’m not talking about your normal, well shot action scenes. This isn’t your grandpa’s action adventure. Bone crunching and relentless, they sit in a league all their own for vicious viewing.

In order for the movie to pull off this sense of realism, you need an actor who is versatile and somewhat athletic. Hyperbole completely aside, this is Vaughn like you’ve never seen him before. Shaved head with lean muscle added to his already hulking tall frame, he’s a different specimen than the funny guys in his bigger hits like Old School and The Wedding Crashers. His Trent from Swingers is deeply buried under the plain expression of Bradley, a man who must fight through the gutter of the prison system to save his family.

Everything changes about 20 minutes in, when Thomas goes after a prison guard. A well-choreographed fist fight turns gruesome when Bradley snaps the man’s arm like a twig. Later on, he breaks a man’s back by squeezing him into a mega bear hold and swinging the poor guy around like a large doll. There are also three separate instances of a head being stomped in or stomped completely off the body. It is different from John Wick violence, where a guy may get a knife stuck in his head or a book jammed into his jaw, but the body will remain intact. That’s more stylized than Vaughn’s vigilante decapitating a man with his foot.

Vaughn turns Thomas into a one-man wrecking machine, beating and killing his way through the two prisons like they were managed by a high school football team instead of trained guards. Being outnumbered doesn’t scare him at all; in fact, it’s almost as if he craves the odds being stacked against him. Once he takes out the one guard, it’s a nonstop jaunt to the final fight inside Cell Block 99. It’s either do the deed, or the wife and unborn kid are brutally murdered. While the bone-snapping torture makes you want to check Bradley into an anger management course, you can’t help but quietly root for him.

The actor makes it all authentic with a performance that doesn’t remind you of anything he’s done before. Sure, there have been a few tough guys and fighter-types, but no one as sinister and cold-blooded deadly as Bradley Thomas. He sits in a league of his own for the actor’s repertoire, a departure of the highest order. There aren’t many cinematic tough guys who could take on Thomas, and live to speak of it. Wick, Jason Bourne, and any Arnold movie. The Rock may get whooped by Bradley, and that’s not a slight on Mr. Johnson. Crazy makes a very tall, well-built guy who knows how to fight super-sized deadly.

Could you have thought a funnyman like Vaughn could pull something like that off? The answers will differ before and after the viewing. Like Zahler’s other films, Bone Tomahawk (the guy literally being ripped in half by cannibals) and Dragged Across Concrete (also with Vaughn), Brawl in Cell Block 99 is relentless, gruesome violence that never becomes gratuitous because it fits the world that was built around the carnage. No special effects. All prosthetics. You gotta love it.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a hard R and streaming for free on Netflix and Hulu.