Brawl in Cell Block 99
Director: S. Craig Zahler
It speaks well for a movie when you put it on late at night, only intending to watch about 30 minutes of it, only to find yourself still up at nearly 2:00 AM, having been gripped for two full hours. Such was the case with Brawl in Cell Block 99.
Vince Vaughan plays against type here, as Bradley Thomas, a hard-working blue collar guy who has a run of some bad luck. He's already having some marital problems, and then he loses his job. He and his wife decide to regroup and try to have a baby, but in order to have the money, they also agree that Bradley will return to his old job of running drugs. When one particularly risky job goes very wrong, Bradley ends up in prison. On top of this, his now-pregnant wife is taken hostage and Bradley is told that the lives of his wife and unborn baby depend on his getting into a different, maximum security prison, and killing another inmate there, all at the behest of some supremely vicious gangsters.
This movie is gritty, brutal, and it uses the slow-burn approach to near-perfection. But where this approach is often used to describe the pacing and rhythm of the plot unfolding, in Brawl in Cell Block 99, it's more about the shift in tone and setting. The first 20 or so minutes of the movie take place in the middle of several bright, sunny days. But as things start to go south, actions take place more at night. Once Bradley is in prison, things continue to darken and constrict, until he is in virtual hell, with the visuals to match this descent every step of the way. The sense of Bradley being a man being slowly and horribly boxed in is palpable, thanks to strong performances and a cohesive visual style.
And the violence? Oh boy. What is only revealed in infrequent, relatively tame moments early in the picture devolve into full-on B-movie, grind-house gore by movie's end. Bradley is a supremely tough human being - a former boxer who knows how to handle himself, as well as keep his considerable anger in check. In an early scene, when he has very good reason to be enraged, he uses his bare hands to do a few thousand dollars' worth of damage to an innocent Dodge in his driveway. As situations grow more dire and intense around him, though, blood starts to spill and bones start to break. And the camera does not flinch in these moments. The final few sequences become an all-out, revenge fantasy gore-fest that would be much more disturbing if it weren't so completely over the top.
As brutal as it is, I was riveted by this movie. Vince Vaughan is actually quite good as this ultra-dark version of Cool Hand Luke. Sure, this southern accent slips a bit here and there, but he has Bradley's attitude down pat. And all the villains, who are pure evil, are played to perfection by faces both unknown and known, including Don Johnson and Udo Kier. Often, one-dimensional villains can be boring, but Zahler knows that they can work in a very straightforward, violent fantasy story such as this.
I now plan to go back and see some of Zahler's earlier work, especially Bone Tomahawk, which I'm told is arguably better and just as gory as Brawl in Cell Block 99. Fans who don't flinch from dark themes and violence that crescendos to cartoon-like levels by film's end should give this one a shot.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Really disappointing. If it weren't drawing a few worthy elements from its source material, this would have even been a bad movie.
After recommendations from several fellow video game nerd friends, I finally read Ernest Cline's popular 2011 pop sci-fi novel Ready Player One. It's a fun read, despite not being particularly deep or intellectually engaging. Rather, it's a genuine love letter novel by a Generation X devotee to the popular video games, fantasy, and science-fiction entertainment that he grew up with in the 1980s. The premise is clever and intelligent enough to carry the heavily plot-driven story and make for a real page-turner. Though not a particularly fast reader, I plowed through the 370-page book in a few days, thanks to a compelling tale and the endless pop culture references. I know never to expect a movie adaptation to be as good as a decent novel, but this film fell woefully short of its potential.
The story takes place in the early 2040s, when the world is fully immersed in a decades-long degradation into the overpopulated, ever-more dystopian future that we in the 2010s are currently fearing. One of the few universally-shared pleasures of humanity in this future is the open-access virtual online world, The OASIS, which was created by a genius game designer in the 2030s and quickly became an escape for a stunning percentage of humanity. The designer, the reclusive James Halliday, left a tantalizing contest embedded within the OASIS upon his death in the late 2030s - an "Easter egg," or hidden prize - which will grant its finder complete ownership of the OASIS, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. One young egg hunter, or "gunter" as they're called, is Wade Watts, an 18-year old kid stuck in a particularly impoverished area in Ohio. Wade and a few fellow dedicated gunters begin to find a few of Halliday's well-hidden clues and beat some of his tremendously difficult challenges to get closer to The Egg. Unfortunately, The Egg is also being hotly pursued by the corporation IOI and its CEO, Nolan Sorrento. The ever-expanding and profit-oriented IOI wants to take over the OASIS and monetize every last scrap of it.
The film itself, in short, was too fast and way too much flash over substance. Let me be very clear here - I love video games. I think that Ernest Cline, who also helped co-write the adapted screenplay, along with Zak Penn, and I would have plenty of common interests to geek out over. It's part of the reason I enjoyed the novel. But the novel is paced very well, allowing the story to breathe a bit between the more thrilling segments. It allows the hunt for the keys and eggs to take on great significance, as Wade, the other gunters, and IOI's brain trust wrack their brains trying to puzzle out Halliday's riddles over the course of weeks and sometimes months. In the film, though, the keys and eggs are all found within a matter of a couple of days. There's barely enough time to see the importance of anything before you're being whipped around a bunch of hyper-kinetic, pure CGI landscapes crammed with dozens and sometimes hundreds of characters. Even the handful of "main" characters - Wade and four other top gunters - get almost no time to make much of an impression. We learn only so much about their backgrounds or motivations, and even these are glossed over so quickly that they have little to no time to inspire much sympathy. While Cline's novel isn't overly adept at creating deep and genuine characters, they were at least fleshed out enough that I cared about their relationships with each other a bit.
 |
| The CGI is about a s good as it gets, which only serves to illustrate how even the best computer effects can't compensate for a story that lacks proper rhythm and depth. |
I was actually even more surprised that Steven Spielberg was in the director's chair for what I found to be a clumsy effort. Yes, the visuals are stunning, as you would expect from a director with his eye and cutting-edge visual film techniques at his command. But I expect far better story-telling from Spielberg. Even beyond how incredibly rushed everything is, there are so many hackneyed and cheesy elements that I was rolling my eyes and wincing by the third act.
This is ultimately a movie that I think is a missed opportunity. Many tantalizing ingredients were there, but the chefs rushed it and ended up with a dish that felt under-cooked and unsatisfying.
No comments:
Post a Comment