By Chris Tookey
Last updated at 8:31 AM on 15th July 2011
Verdict: Brutal but captivating
Rating: 
Terrific prison movies don’t come along every year. Nor do gripping thrillers with a startlingly original central idea. Just as rare are foreign language films that are well-paced, tightly plotted and deliver a memorable story with rounded characters, brilliantly acted, to a mainstream audience.
Cell 211 is all these things. The hero is rookie prison guard Juan (Alberto Ammann).
He has taken the job because his last gig in a slaughterhouse didn’t work out, and he needs money because his pretty wife (Marta Etura) is six months pregnant. He’s a nice, handsome, open-faced chap, like a taller James McAvoy.
Staying alive: Alberto Ammann plays Juan, a warder who is caught up in a prison riot with thuggish inmates in the Spanish thriller Cell 211He’s shown round a Spanish jail by two more experienced, cynical colleagues. With characteristic keenness, Juan has turned up a day early to find out how they cope with the high-security prisoners. ‘This will give him an idea,’ smirks one of the old timers.
The prison is in poor repair, and a lump of falling masonry from the ceiling knocks Juan out. The warders drag him into a bunk in an unoccupied cell — 211 — and go to find help.
By unfortunate coincidence, a prison riot breaks out.
The older jailers realise their lives are in danger and escape. Juan wakes up to find himself a lone symbol of hated authority in a uniquely dangerous situation.
So he rids himself of shoelaces, wallet and wedding ring — all potentially fatal evidence that he’s not a prisoner — strides into a public area, and tries to pass himself off as a recently admitted murderer.
It’s a situation deliciously fraught with suspicion and menace. Can this innocent, with no tattoos or street credibility, really pass himself off as a criminal? Will he remain on the side of the authorities, and help quell the riot? Or will he ‘go native’ and join the convicts?
At first, the film resembles a straightforward good-versus-evil action thriller — essentially Die Hard in a prison, with Juan a resourceful hero, impressing, befriending and occasionally daring to confront the intimidating, scary Malamadre (Luis Tosar), the bald, seemingly psychotic alpha male among the prisoners, a swaggering dictator who sounds like Lee Marvin gargling with gravel. He’s the most frightening screen presence since Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs Of New York.
The tension between Juan and Malamadre is the lynchpin of the film, and both actors are as expert as Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were in The King’s Speech.
Juan knows his best hope of staying alive is to remain tight with Malamadre. The bright but uneducated Malamadre comes to realise that Juan is a shrewd tactician, unlike the morons who are his usual sidekicks.
But then the riot takes on unexpected dimensions. There is a political angle, for the prisoners take hostage some unpopular Basque terrorists.
The authorities fear an invasion by police might trigger murders of the ‘political’ prisoners, with nationwide repercussions.
Other factors include the prison authorities’ incompetent public relations and the kneejerk violent reactions of certain warders. Juan becomes uncomfortably aware the prisoners have legitimate grievances.
He also finds himself cruelly compromised — and brutalised — by his own desire to stay alive.
Terrifying: The film features one of the scariest bad guys in years, played by Luis Tosar (far right)Be warned that this film is not for the squeamish. Wrists and a throat are slashed, an ear is sliced off, and there are stabbings and shootings galore.
But this is not the kind of slick, cynical violence we’re used to seeing in Hollywood films; it is shot for maximum realism and shock value, and it has a sickening power.
Like all the best prison melodramas, the movie places a decent, sympathetic character in a believable situation where conventional morality no longer applies.
However extreme his reactions, Juan remains a sympathetic protagonist — far more so, to my mind, than Malik, the slippery anti-hero of this film’s French counterpart, A Prophet — and the movie neatly avoids the usual, optimistic Hollywood cliches.
For there have been similar situations before. You may remember Tim Robbins struggling for survival among brutish inmates in The Shawshank Redemption, as an innocent man jailed for murder.
Johnny Depp was also memorable as Donnie Brasco, an undercover cop finding himself increasingly in sympathy with gangsters he was supposed to be bringing to justice.
Cell 211’s descent into nightmare and moral chaos also evokes memories of two Scorsese films: Gangs Of New York and Shutter Island. Despite these echoes, director Daniel Monzon and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria (adapting a novel by Francisco Perez Gandul) ensure that the storyline remains on a logical yet constantly surprising route.
Authenticity is maintained despite the numerous plot-twists, because the quality of acting is remarkably high, and some smaller roles are played by some extremely menacing real-life prison inmates.
The film-makers wisely resist the temptation to make Juan a classically upright Hollywood hero. In taking a more pessimistic direction, the film comes across as infinitely more realistic.
The way the film shows a young man being drawn into violence and coming to terms with some very uncomfortable aspects of his own masculinity reminded me of Fight Club, another film that uses extreme violence to make pertinent points about the human condition.
Cell 211 won eight Goyas — the Spanish Oscars — and is about to be given a Hollywood remake by writer-director Paul Haggis, whose politically correct track record (Crash, In The Valley Of Elah) suggests he will make it a good deal more conventional and, I fear, preachy.
One thing you can depend on is that it won’t have the courage or innovative spirit of the Spanish movie — and I bet they give it a softer ending. I would strongly recommend you to seek out the original.
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