Review of Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) by Blake B — 25 Dec 2017

This film was a cheat with a horrible, dumb ending (I won't give away) but be forewarned. It's miserable, ponderous & overlong. While Vince Vaughn enters a more serious, mature and transformative role we can route for, the character just stays one-dimensional when we want him to tranform and have an actual arc.

Don Johnson is notable for his performance, his role is suave and confident as the badass contracted? warden of the worst maximum security prison. But him and Vaugn could not save this picture. Too many lingering shots on nothing does not make you an art film automatically.

This may have been the editor and directors fault, or maybe the producers. Who knows..We can understand good pacing in a film, but when there's 30 seconds or more of a shot of Vaugh just driving down a driveway, it becomes cumbersome as fuck, but this repeats up to the stupid dumb ending.

When a director asks too much of an audience, when you ask for too patience, it better amount to something. In this case it doesn't, in this case, it's the film version of trolling which is why I absolutely do not recommend this.

The only thing I recommend about this is Vince Vaughns performance, up to the first half then it's torture porn and turns into very stupid grindhouse crap with the most deliberately horrible, lame ass ending ever.

Like the director is trolling say "Haha, I wasted your time, gotcha now, thanks for seeing me film!" Vaugn is serious here though as an actor and his talent deserves way better than this slog with a stupid ending, Granted, there were some good moments, but Don Johnson and Vince Vaughn weren't given enough good material when things fall even flatter in the 3rd act.

Stall in Cell block 99 might be a better title..Or better, cheated out of 2 hours.