Brawl in Cell Block 99

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) is a patient film, and the patience is deliberate. Bradley is a former boxer. He loses his job, his marriage falls apart, and he starts running drugs for an old friend. A job goes wrong and he goes to prison. Inside, the people who have taken his wife want something from him: get to cell block 99 and kill a man there. The problem is that block 99 is not somewhere you can be sent by ordinary means. Bradley has to open a path to it himself. The first half is almost silent. S. Craig Zahler holds his scenes long, there is barely any score, and the camera does not move. Then the violence starts and is shown head on without cutting away. That is Zahler's method: make you wait, then soften nothing. Vince Vaughn spent his career in comedy. Here he has a shaved head, a cross tattooed on the back of it, and very few words, and he is convincing. Zahler is also a novelist and a metal musician, which is where the sense of rhythm in his films comes from. It runs 132 minutes. Good for: hard crime films, prison drama, and slow building tension. Less good for: the violence is genuinely graphic and some scenes are hard to sit through. Nothing happens for the first forty minutes.