Vince Vaughn is playing one tough SOB in the upcoming Brawl in Cell Block 99, which is due to hit theaters in October, this fall. The film is directed by S. Craig Zahler, the same mastermind behind that hard-nosed, unforgiving masterpiece that was Bone Tomahawk, starring Kurt Russel and Matthew Fox.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 appears to have the exact same sort of cement-edged masculinity about it that Bone Tomahawk carried, so you don’t have to worry about entering into the movie having to suffer from one of those pansy “heroes” that Hollywood has been churning out lately in their AAA blockbusters that most of us have given up watching.
No… instead of a whiny louse pushing an anti-violence message, or some scrawny lady’s man trying to charm up the screen, Zahler has a tall, toned, and terrifying looking Vince Vaughn commanding the screen with the sort of intimidating presence that many of us forgot he could exhibit. He portrays a man of few words and one of strong fists, as evident in the perfectly constructed minute and 40 second trailer below, where he exercises the sort of fisticuffs on a car that one would have expected from one of the pugilists in Capcom’s Street Fighter II bonus round. Check it out below, courtesy of RLJE Movies.
So the basic synopsis is that Vaughn’s character was previously a boxer but he ends up getting involved in drug running and then he ends up in prison.
Jennifer Carpenter plays his hot, pregnant wife, and Don Johnson seems to be popping up every once in a while with career defining roles as characters that Tommy Lee Jones would have been cast in if this were the 1990s.
Anyway, the gritty realism and washed out visual tone gives this film that gut-wrenching feeling as if the violence will be uncompromising and visceral, much like Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, or many of David Ayer’s non-DC flicks.
Hopefully Brawl in Cell Block 99 is as good as it looks in the trailer. And props to the marketing team for not spoiling the whole movie in two minutes like so many other film trailers out there.
