Harry Brown – Martyn’s Review
Michael Caine is Harry Brown. In a long and resplendent career he’s been Jack Carter, Alfie, Harry Palmer, Alfred the Butler and Austin Power’s dad, to name a few. The man is a legend and in his august years, starring in a film set in his home city, in which he kicks arse as a senior citizen dispensing some rough justice to criminal feral youths. Violent lives will meet a violent end. So goes the film’s message.
By coincidence, Daniel Barber’s debut holds a few similarities with Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. As in Eastwood’s final acting gig, there is something very elegiac about Michael Caine’s performance: all shuffling movements and sad eyes until he finds inner strength through violent means.
Harry Brown is a widowed pensioner living on a council estate descended into social chaos. It is a place where gangs loiter, rob and kill for kicks. Harry, a former Royal Marine, looks on with measured disgust until his only friend in the world, Leonard, (David Bradley) is killed by the bloody thugs.
With nothing left to live for, Harry Brown decides to clean up the streets…Travis Bickle-style. He chooses to fight gunfire with gunfire, so to speak. In one scene, Harry is bewildered by the gangs reasons for being so out of control noting that when he was a soldier in Northern Ireland: “At least they were fighting for a cause…these are just doing it for entertainment.”
The opening montage gives the audience a disturbing (and hysterical) glimpse of London’s council estate underworld. Daily Mail readers would surely be nodding in agreement as violent scenes are captured on mobile phones: the phenomenon of “happy-slapping” taken to dangerous heights; including gang initiations, drug-taking and a single mother shot by feral youths on a motorcycle, only for them to smash into a car and scatter across the road, dead.
A good majority of the film’s blood letting straddles a path between cinematic-fantasy violence (shootouts in subways?) and plausibility. Of course what Harry does is immoral, but it makes for a cracking film.
Like last year’s Eden Lake, the modern phenomenon known as the “chav” or “hoodie” is deliberately played up to psychopathic levels. It is at once ridiculous and believable. Harry Brown’s take on underprivileged youths in London seems less social-realism and more hysterical- realism.
In the film’s stand-out scene, Brown meets a heroin dealer (Sean Harris) to buy a gun before becoming so disgusted by the filth and grim that he kills the dealer, rescues an over-dosing girl and makes off with the money and a set of guns. This whole, tense scene is an acting master-class. Harris’ emaciated junkie, riddled with tattoos and scars showcases one of Britain’s most underrated actor: his character is a cross between Christian Bale in The Machinist via Gary Oldman in True Romance. A stunning cameo.
Once “Dirty” Harry’s killing spree grabs the attention of two cops investigating his friend’s death (Emily Mortimer) and the ever-excellent Charlie Creed-Miles, the film enters melodramatic territory, especially, as it reaches its bloody “saloon-style” showdown.
The film is not necessarily making a social or political comment on “Broken Britain” – however, it is the complete antithesis of liberal Ken Loach-like films on social deprivation and crime. The distinct lack of something as omnipotent as CCTV on such a crime-ridden council estate highlights its intentions towards reality and logic.
Michael Caine is as sublime as ever. Sure, he’s been in some ropey films, and he’s always admitted he took some for the money, but he’s never delivered a dud performance in over forty years. As screen legends often do, Caine lifts the material up a notch, by grace of his very presence. It is a great piece of exploitation cinema and, perhaps, Caine’s last great role.
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