Harry Brown

When this film first came out there was a lot of fanfare attached to it in regards to Michael Caine getting back to his tough guy roots (with inevitable comparisons to Get Carter). There was also some flack for the level of violence, with some reviewers complaining that the film went too far. I don't think either train of thought really stands up to scrutiny, and I think Harry Brown is actually an interesting film in it's own right. There is some apt comparison to be made with Gran Torino, a similar tale of old man-turned-vigilante from across the pond, but Harry Brown wins out in terms of credibility. Whereas Gran Torino did most of it's business off the back of Clint Eastwood's status as a living icon, Harry Brown prefers instead to focus on maintaining a certain sense of realism to explore similar ideas of community, crime and the failure of the system.

Harry Brown (Michael Caine) is a widower living in one of Britain's notorious low-income estates. He maintains a certain sense of dignity in the face of rising youth-related crime and the encroaching sense of lawlessness that surrounds him, but when his only friend Leonard (David Bradley, best known for his ongoing role in the Harry Potter films) becomes too afraid to take it anymore, Brown is forced to call upon his long-buried skills as a marine to restore some order to the community. Alice (Emily Mortimer), is a local detective who seeks to achieve some results where most of her colleagues have given up, and she finds herself investigating the puzzling aftermaths of Harry's vigilantism.

Harry Brown takes the worst of chav gangsterism to build a case against the inability of the law to protect those at the mercy of drug-abusing teens and cold-blooded killers. The level of violence in this film is confronting, but it's not gratuitous or exploitative - it's a realistic depiction of the unpredictable and fleeting brutality of real life thuggery. The only sequence that I can form any real negative criticism against is the early scene where two teens on a motorbike senselessly shoot a woman with a pram. It's never linked to the plot nor referred to again throughout the course of the film, and as such it stands out as a too obviously manipulative attempt to put the viewer on Harry's side from the outset. It's a shocking moment so it's hard to ignore it, and the director and writer would probably hold it up as an example of the changing nature of crime, but that's a load of crap as I'd argue that the socio-economic relationship between crime and youth gangs is nothing new. But anyway, it's one small flaw, and aside from this the rest of the film is well-structured and thematically sound.

It's said by staticians like Stephen D. Levitt that crime in the western world is down in comparison to earlier decades, but I think media exposure and the increasingly failure of our legal system to combat violence and the drug trade has prompted wider levels of fear in the public (the main example of this in the film is how ineffectual the police are when faced with rioting estate gangs). There's always this sense in the media that our society is on the brink of collapse, and Harry Brown exemplifies this by personifying the silent majority as Harry and Leonard - the old guard watching their world slip away under a tide of lawless scum. As a result, it's a very grim film, something that isn't alleviated in the slightest by Harry's transformation into a veangeful angel of death due to the film's unwillingness to take the Hollywood route...

Unlike Eastwood in Gran Torino (or any other film about righteous vigilantism), Caine and the filmmaker resist fetishising Harry as a tough-talking action hero. Harry might go on a revenge-fuelled rampage but he's still very much an old man, with an old man's body and an old man's attitude, speaking dialogue very much in keeping with a quiet, unassuming ex-army man in his late 70s. Caine doesn't have the same history as Eastwood - his career hasn't been as singleminded or focused on creating an iconic screen persona, so he doesn't come with the baggage of an action star. He's able to convince the viewer of the reality of this film. When he sits in the house of a disturbing-looking junkie gunrunner (Sean Harris), he's very much an alien in this world. He shouldn't be interacting with these gun-toting animals, and he looks every bit as uncomfortable as his character should be. He doesn't offer a multitude of pun-heavy zingers, nor does he hold his gun in an aesthetically-pleasing manner (though try telling that to the graphic designers and marketing minions who promoted this film...) 'Refreshing' is probably the wrong word for such a downbeat film, but it's certainly a welcome break from the way the film industry parasitically glosses up the crime world for the benefit of a gangsta-wannabe audience.

It's an interesting film that reflects the attitudes of our modern times, and it's important as a non-American perspective on a very American subgenre. And, as much as Americans like putting Michael Caine in their films, he still has to go back to Britain to play the lead roles he deserves (though he probably gets paid a lot more for his five minute appearances in films like Inception) so it's worth watching if only to see him do some serious acting again.

DIRECTOR: Daniel Barber
WRITER/SOURCE: Gary Young
KEY ACTORS: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, David Bradley, Iain Glen, Ben Drew, Sean Harris

RELATED TEXTS:
- The most obvious contemporary film would be Gran Torino, in which another old-age screen legend takes it upon himself to clean up the ghetto he lives in.
- The media and marketing worlds latched onto this film as a continuation of Caine's occasional tough-guy screen persona, represented by films such as Get Carter and Shiner.
- Then there's the original vigilante vehicle, Death Wish.

AWARDS:
Daniel Barber was nominated for a 'breakthrough British filmmaker' award by the London Critics Circle.