Review: Harry Brown

Harry Brown starts off with a shot. A gang initiation in the grimy subway tunnels of a London slum goes terribly wrong. Bullets fly, cars speed away in a frantic getaway attempt. When all is said and done, the gang lays sprawled out on the road after an accident, and an innocent mother lay dead.

Harry(Michael Caine) wakes up to this news, but it's the least of his concerns. His wife is in the hospital, dying. He spends the bulk of his days there by her bedside, hoping she can still recognize his presence. A former Royal Marine, Harry's used to having people die around him, but now he's running out of people to care about or who care about him. His best friend, Leonard, is a fellow retiree caught in a grip of fear. The local thugs terrorize him daily, putting dog crap on his doorstep and in his mailbox. Harry urges calling the police, but Leonard admits that he's already done that. The cops either can't do anything or don't care. Leonard vows to stand up for himself the next time. It doesn't end well.

Faced with being truly alone for the first time, Harry quickly loses himself. What had been a sad, pitiful old man resigned to keeping his head down while the world turned to crap around him, he's now found purpose. Interviewed by the sexy Detective Frampton(Emily Mortimer) after Leonard's funeral, he can scarcely contain his anger at their flat footededness. Later that night after a drunken binge, Harry is attacked by one of the town thugs, and his old army muscle memory comes roaring back. A vigilante is born.

Harry Brown isn't quite Gran Torino. In that film, you sorta expected Clint Eastwood to grab his shotgun off the rack and start blasting holes in people. His age didn't mattter. With Michael Caine it takes a little bit of time to get reacquainted with the idea of him offing people 1/4th his age. He's become such a soft-hearted soul on screen that I think we just sorta expect him to shrug everything off and whistle a happy tune. It's for exactly that reason that Caine is so good here. He doesn't try to overplay it. He doesn't turn Harry into a violent force of nature. He plays the character as an older man relying on cunning and what he remembers being able to do as a young soldier. You can see the gears working in his brain, especially during a frightening scene in which Harry walks right into the heart of the enemy's den, a filthy criminal workshop that has become the heart of everything gone wrong in his neighborhood.

First time director Daniel Barber employs a slow, deliberate pace throughout. It's not a style that lends itself to what is basically a revenge thriller, but it works thanks mostly to Caine's subtle performance. There's been an uptick in movies about older men with violent pasts, finding their inner warrior when the world around them has been threatened. The aforementioned Gran Torino comes to mind along with last year's Taken. Harry Brown combines the elements of both of those, but gets a lot more help in the credibility department thanks to the strong supporting cast. Mortimer is particularly good as the buttoned up detective who knows there's more to this seemingly harmless old man than meets the eye.

There's a deeper subtext involving police corruption and political manueverings that allow a vigilante like Harry Brown to exist and thrive, but all that stuff is just window dressing. It's Caine and Mortimer who push what could've been a standard thriller into a thought provoking, emotional thrill.