First, it must be said that Harry Brown is one of the most gorgeous-looking British films of the decade. This revenger’s tragedy, set on a South London council estate and starring Michael Caine, has been duly dipped in inky blacks and autumnal browns and recalls mostly the rich shadowy look of The Godfather or the urban darkness of Seven. For this, credit must go to the ace rising-star cinematographer Martin Ruhe (Control). But the film itself is morally and politically odious, and would be easy to dismiss were it not for the galvanising performance of Caine, playing a superannuated killing machine.
He is Harry Brown, an army veteran and quietly dignified septuagenarian whose life is measured by early morning cuppas, by diligent hospital visits to his dying wife Kath (Liz Daniels), and by his assiduous avoidance of the crack-dealing, gang-raping, gun-toting delinquents who terrorise his estate. Nevertheless, when Kath dies, in the opening act, and when Harry’s drinking buddy Leonard (David Bradley) is brutally murdered by the aforementioned vermin, Harry gets in touch with his inner Rambo and goes on a revenge mission — he stabs, he tortures, he shoots, and he delivers to those punks the only thing they deserve: death.
Of course, it could be argued that the first-time director Daniel Barber and the novice writer Gary Young are merely revisiting a well-worn urban genre, familiar to fans of white-male-in-peril movies, from Dirty Harry to Gran Torino. But there’s something else going on here. Harry Brown has none of the mature compassion of Eastwood’s Gran Torino and no sense of moral ambiguity either. Instead, there is hateful rage in the movie’s depiction of its hoodie-clad antagonists. At times this veers into a strange leering voyeurism, as when a sinuous drug dealer called Stretch (Sean Harris) reveals that he keeps a female companion in a semi-comatose state, so that she can unconsciously service him and his equally savage companions.
The twist with Harry Brown is that Caine’s performance is somehow a palliative to all this emetic bile. Even when doing very little, he makes you watch him. And here he proves, as he did in the recent Is Anybody There?, that he can hold almost an entire film together with a just a few solemn-eyed close-ups and the hint of fulminating emotional turmoil within. Thus when Harry suddenly weeps for Leonard or gets to deliver one of the few audience-pleasing quips (“You failed to maintain your weapon, son!” he says, before blasting a luckless hoodie to bits), you are teased with a taste of the film Harry Brown could have been without such a reactionary hand on the tiller.
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18, 103mins