Review: Harry Brown

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Harry Brown

When I was in high school, I saw Hannah and Her Sisters and had such a crush on Michael Caine. That was my gateway drug to Caine movies, and led me to Sleuth and The Wrong Box and Mona Lisa and a lot of bad movies I hate to mention (The Swarm, sadly, and Sweet Liberty). So I experienced a moment of shock in the first scene with Caine in Harry Brown, when he shuffled out of bed and looked surprisingly like my grandfather. That's what having crushes on older men in films gets you. I don't even want to talk about Harrison Ford in the last Indiana Jones movie.

After recoving from my little moment of shock and mortality, I found Harry Brown an absorbing combination of melodrama and vigilantism. Caine plays the title character, who as he is growing older finds himself increasingly alone in the world. His wife dies of an unspecified long illness, his daughter is long dead. His best friend Leonard (David Bradley) has been complaining about the young people in their housing project who continually plague him ... and when Leonard tries to fight back, tragedy strikes.

Harry Brown, on the other hand, is ex-military, and he plots his attacks on the neighborhood gang with more finesse. Meanwhile, police detective Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) is trying to see justice done through legal channels, but to no real effect. She visits Harry and treats him like a child ... and yet, when Harry's vengeful acts catch the attention of the police, Alice is the only one who wonders if he might be a suspect.

Screenwriter Gary Young has scripted all the teenagers as one-note -- living in a housing project, part of a gang, taking drugs and acting reckless all the time. They're chaotic and amoral, and although we are given to understand that they are victims of circumstance, many of them abused and given no opportunities to change their situations, they have no subtle nuances of character and evince little sympathy. The movie portrays them as a blight that must be rooted out. Everyone is either a thug or a victim, although sometimes they end up being both during the course of the movie.

As I mentioned before, I may be still somewhat biased in favor of Caine, although I can't say that I'd watch him in just about anything. He gives an excellent performance as an action hero who simply can't be very active anymore. He's supported beautifully in early scenes by David Bradley, whom you might know as Filch from the Harry Potter movies, or the incoherent guy with the land mine in Hot Fuzz. Emily Mortimer gives a strong performance in the scenes where she is confronting the teenage hooligans, but her interactions with Caine's character are awful -- she makes the oddest faces, and says things like, "You don't have anyone to play with you!" as though he were a five-year-old.

It's too easy to compare Harry Brown to Clint Eastwood's film Gran Torino, about another cranky old man who intends to clean up the teenage gang crime in his neighborhood. Gran Torino had more complex supporting characters, and a vein of humor. Harry Brown is more melodramatic, and yet the melodrama is so obvious that it gives the film license to get away successfully with over-the-top images and scenes. I'm not sure the film would have worked nearly so well without Caine in the lead, reminding us of the heroes and antiheroes he's played in previous decades. I'm not often a fan of vigilante movies, but I'd happily watch Harry Brown again.

You forgot!!

What about Dirty Rotten Scoundels? Loved Caine in that movie.

I can handle Caine getting old better than Cusack looking like he'd had a hair transplant and face lift in 2012. Where'd his cute little crow's feet go?!