Harry Brown is an excellent movie to add to the old Michael Caine crime thrillers of the 1960s and ’70s, and it does an excellent job of showcasing it’s leading man’s acting chops. Set in South London (specifically, it was shot in Elephant and Castle — the neighborhood Caine grew up in), the film follows a few weeks in the life of an elderly pensioner, Brown, as he loses his best/only friend to gang violence in their council estate (for Americans, think “projects”). Brown, having lost his wife and his friend, is attacked after tying one on to mourn his friend.
Thus starts Brown’s vigilante quest to clean up his housing estate. The movie is very dark, claustrophobic, and the sets are dirty — and not artfully dirty, as they would be in a Hollywood film, but truly dingy. The villains are bored, violent, hopeless kids and the movie does show their feelings of abandonment, their victimization, and their lack of direction and hope…but it does not excuse their actions. These are bad, bad “kids”. Monsters. The depiction of the senseless violence they commit is caught on their cell phones, and shows a lack of regard for anything at all. There is a scene where Brown goes to buy a gun that is intense, frightening, and shows the hollowed out, evil collection of trash he’s dealing with.
In fact, the police detective (Emily Mortimer) is the representative face of the “kinder, gentler” nanny state: she is appalled and emotional in the face of violence, and utterly useless to the victims, or even to defend herself at one point; her methods, the methods of the Metropolitan Police are completely ineffectual. Their interrogations of the kids following their murder of Len, Brown’s friend, are flaccid, almost comical in their uselessness; both the criminals and the cops know that they are powerless to do anything to them. Brown’s use of his long-atrophied Royal Marine training, and his Sig-Sauer P226 are more use to the neighborhood.
The movie is very dark, quite violent — both physically and emotionally, and I heard one of the other theater-goers refer to it as “ugly”. It is, however, an excellent movie, with tremendous performances from the whole cast.
The Black Campbell 