Brawl in Cell Block 99

I watched this movie because of the director’s amazing work with Bone Tomahawk. That movie was a breathtaking piece of brutality and slow burn horror in the old west. Brawl, unfortunately, shares little DNA with Bone aside from the unflinching gore. Well, it is also slow, but not in the right way. Vince Vaughn does a decent enough job as the main character, although he’s really just the same snarky douche you find in Dodgeball, just with the volume turned down, so it’s not like this is so far out of his wheelhouse. The movie is filmed well, especially the fight scenes, which are captured with patience and crafting instead of the MCU’s 37 cuts in 12 seconds philosophy. The near-total lack of a score actually works well here, letting the moments breathe and impact you on their own rather than being reliant on music cues. But the biggest problem is a script that does nobody any favors, and never lives up to the  carnage the title suggests. Vaughn’s Bradley, the ostensible protagonist, is at best lawful neutral. I normally wouldn’t have a problem with that — look at shows like Breaking Bad — but Bradley is far from a compelling character, and comes off as a bit of a domineering ass regarding his wife. Walter White was compelling to watch because he was a regular guy getting into something way over his head and screwing up at every juncture; Bradley never once feels out of place. Nothing feels like a struggle, and it doesn’t help that he just shrugs it off and all his plans work out. There’s also severe pacing issues here, with the prison aspect of the movie not coming until the halfway point, and the titular cell block not coming for even further in. The movie is slow to the point of being laconic, not so much assembling the pieces of the plot as it does pointing them out like a tour guide as they pass by. And the titular event sounds like a crazy riot; it’s just a fight. A well-staged fight, sure, and brutal, but it’s nowhere near the carnage I assumed. I expected the prison riot from Natural Born Killers. I had to wait an hour and a half for a fight smaller in scale than most of the brawls from Road House. Add to that a story progression with no surprises and nothing you haven’t seen before, and it all just feels kind of … blah. Empty. Lacking substance. And at 2:15 in length, that’s a heavy lift for a movie that only just gets a toe over the line of okay.