Michael Caine

Letting his grave, limpid stare do most of the heavy lifting, Michael Caine makes not a single interpretive misstep in the British thriller "Harry Brown."

The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.

Many have admired it on a gut-and-bloodlust level. Many more will likely enjoy this story of righteous revenge, set in a contemporary South London housing project where drug-fueled human vermin run the show and a stoic pensioner such as Harry Brown can only watch, waiting for the instigating incident to light his fuse. After a stealthy buildup, wherein we see Harry lose his wife to natural causes and his best friend to unnaturally brutal ones, Gary Young's script gets down to it. Harry unleashes his frustrations with the hapless police (Emily Mortimer plays a sympathetic investigator caught up in the mess) the way any true-blue vigilante must: by taking the law into his own hands, wiping out the punks and restoring a bit of order to a world ruled by one "random and senseless act of violence" after another.

First-time feature director Daniel Barber has insisted "Harry Brown" is nothing like "Death Wish," and yet, of course, it is, with some variations. This hero is well into his 70s, which makes the eventual slaughter all the more incongruous. (Or would, if Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" hadn't been a worldwide smash.) Unlike the hysterical grunge favored by director Michael Winner in "Death Wish," Barber sets a calm, somber tone at the outset, which makes Harry's dive into the later on-screen depravity all the more striking in theory.

In practice, though, the film exists for one reason only: to see bloody justice done so that a quiet, good man can walk tall and prevail. The urban Western genre, of which "Harry Brown" is an example, has for decades replaced the rural Western. Much as I detest the influence the Dirty Harry franchise had on American and worldwide cinema, Don Siegel's 1971 film at least managed a few moments of disquieting ambiguity along with the thrills. "Harry Brown" is unambiguous, and it apes so many related revenger's tales (the final melee rips off "Taxi Driver," a key work of the 1970s) that it never manages to generate much specificity of character or place.

Caine's performance evokes his tough guys of old, namely those he played so flintily and well in "Get Carter" and the Harry Palmer spy pictures. This new character, according to director Barber, "doesn't brush his problems under the carpet, and neither should society." This sounds like a clear endorsement of what we see on-screen in "Harry Brown," and not even Caine, fully engaged yet never doing a speck more than is needed, can make it smell any better. The last two words we hear in the movie are "silent majority." If that doesn't evoke the old Nixon-era law-and-order ethos, nothing does.

 

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"Harry Brown" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: R (for strong violence and language throughout, drug use and sexual content).

Running time: 1:42.

Cast: Michael Caine (Harry Brown); Emily Mortimer (Frampton); Charlie Creed-Miles (Hicock); Ben Drew (Noel); Liam Cunningham (Sid); Iain Glen (Childs); David Bradley (Leonard Attwell).

Credits: Directed by Daniel Barber; written by Gary Young; produced by Kris Thykier, Matthew Vaughn and Matthew Brown. A Samuel Goldwyn Films release.