Harry Brown: The New Adventures Of Old Marine

It was a notably older audience who had assembled to watch the Michael Caine vehicle Harry Brown at the screening I attended, but if they were hoping for the same crowd-pleasing thrills as Clint Eastwood’s surprisingly successful don’t-underestimate-the-old-guy vigilante thriller Gran Torino, they went home sorely disappointed. Like Gran Torino, Harry Brown is about a senior citizen who turns out to be a surprisingly formidable opponent for the young gang members terrorizing his neighbourhood, but Harry Brown is a much more grim and depressing experience, thanks to its tobacco-stained colour palette and several scenes in which director Daniel Barber lingers, unpleasantly fascinated, on the seamy behaviour of his villains. In one endless scene, Caine visits a drug dealer’s lair, a back room where a girl is sprawled on a filthy couch, nearly comatose, a needle still stuck in her arm, a thin stream of vomit coursing out of her mouth, while a video of her getting fucked by the dealer plays on a widescreen TV behind her.

What is Caine doing there? Well, he’s tracking down the kids who killed his best friend Leonard (David Bradley, best known as the scraggly old Hogwarts caretaker Angus Filch in the Harry Potter movies), trapping him in an underpass near the housing estate where they all live, stabbing him, pissing on his body, and filming the whole thing on their cameraphones. He lost his faith long ago in the effectiveness of the police, and so he decides to put his training with the British Marines to use. His wife has just died, after all, and presumably he feels he really has nothing to lose.

Harry Brown is a classic case of a movie that wants to have things both ways. On the one hand, it takes pains to establish an atmosphere of gritty, downbeat authenticity, even casting several real-life street thugs to play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Everyone’s skin looks sweaty and their clothes look grimy. The scenes of violence have a cruel, nasty edge to them.

Now, Caine has told several interviewers that Harry Brown is different from most vigilante movies because you can see the misgivings on Harry’s face and the emotional toll that all this killing is having on him. Harry also has emphysema, and on a couple of occasions, he physically collapses after one of his surprise attacks on the gang members. Well, that’s true but it’s also not true. Caine does play Harry with a certain autumnal gravitas, as a man who has a thirst for vengeance but whose taste buds have mostly died.

But in practice, you’re still being handed a fantasy about a senior citizen who’s still the deadliest shot in the neighbourhood, who apparently can drag an unconscious youth up the stairs to an impromptu torture chamber, and who can even drag himself out of his hospital bed and venture out into the night to go do some more killing. You’re also getting a film in which the gang members are all portrayed as utterly loathsome, subhuman scum — in one scene, a drug kingpin forces one of the boys working for him to give him a blowjob, and no sooner is this transaction completed than Caine blows a bullethole through his skull. The grit isn’t there to undermine our vigilante fantasies; it’s really there to reinforce them, to lend our fantasies an extra sense of urgency. The result is a nasty little movie that leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth and a heaviness in your step as you walk home, going blocks out of your way to avoiding using any dimly lit underpasses.