Brawl in Cell Block 99

S Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 is one of those films that highlights the inherent primitiveness of the star rating system. In many ways the film in which Vince Vaughn plays a criminal ex-boxer with a crucifix tattoo on the back of his head, in which Vince Vaughn breaks someone’s back with what is essentially a strong hug, and in which Vince Vaughn crushes at least three skulls is a solid two-star film. It boasts solid two-star qualities like the most basic of plots, Don Johnson, uneven characters and, surprisingly given how violent the film is, pretty dire fight sequences.

And at the same time, it can’t be anything but a five-star film, for pretty much the same insane reasons. Vince Vaughn breaks someone’s back! Vince Vaughn is a skinhead with a skull tattoo! Don Johnson! The fight sequences are endearingly terrible! The story feels paper-thin only because Brawl in Cell Block 99 isn’t really one film but a demented spiral across at least three plots in which Vaughn’s Bradley plays everyone from a cuckold, an ex-con trying to do good through to a psycho, a prisoner and an avenger. The film is full of clichés but moves far too quickly for us to process any of them. The violence bleeds (almost literally) over the film’s negatives, leaving you addicted to the sheer insanity of it all.

The canon of films in which middle-aged white men go on a violent rampage is illustrious and roided-up, and Brawl in Cell Block 99 is certainly nothing we haven’t seen before. And yet, there is something about its particular flavour of insanity that makes it oddly unpredictable: yes, we know exactly what’s going to happen but, to the film’s credit, we’re definitely staying just to see how it happens. It’s a solid two-star film that actually exceeds at being a two-star film, so I guess that makes it a five-star two-star film?

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Brawl in Cell Block 99 played at the 2017 BFI London Film Festival, and is released on 20 Oct by Munro Ltd.