Brawl in Cell Block 99
Directed by S. Craig Zahler
Watch out: Veteran comedy actor Vince Vaughn has just transformed himself into “a skull-crushing man-beast,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Pivoting from the facile comedies he’s been making for more than a decade, the 47-year-old actor has shaved his head and assumed a glower to play a menacing inmate who decides to brawl his way into the lowest level of the prison system because the life of his unborn child literally depends on his killing a fellow con. Through all the mayhem, the “still-lovable” actor “gives a psychologically complex performance that neither this brutish genre, nor its intended viewers,
really deserve.” It’s “not a movie for most,” said Chris Nashawaty in Entertainment Weekly. But it is “a sort of sicko exploitation masterpiece”—“as good a film as a film like this can be.” Vaughn has remade himself so completely that he’s like an actor reaching for Oscar glory, said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. Except that he’s after “something much more endearing: He wants to become the new Charles Bronson.” Brawl in Cell Block 99 could well get him there. It’s “the kind of vicious, no-nonsense prison drama that dads dream about when the TV is finally theirs to command.”