It’s very rare for me to see a film which has me babbling excitedly all the way down the street afterwards. Sir Michael Caine’s South London vigilante flick Harry Brown (18) has still got me haemorrhaging ill-conceived conclusions about gang warfare and ineffective policing an hour and a half after leaving the cinema, so I think it’s definitely worth me bending your metaphorical ear about. Harry Brown has been (erroneously) reported as being the last time Caine sets his sights on a lead role, but even if he’s got another twenty years of film-making in him – and who’s to say he hasn’t? – this is not one you want to miss.
Following on from the beautifully crafted dementia comedy of Is Anybody There?, released earlier this year, this film slips Caine into a character close to the role of an enlisted man which he originally coveted in Zulu, playing a widowed ex-Marine languishing in a south-of-the-river estate full of drugs, guns, and youths too keen on both. When his last remaining friend (who it’s hard to pity too much once you realise that he also played that mental caretaker in Harry Potter) falls prey to the gang which loiters in a local underpass, Harry Brown straps on his badman boots and goes after the perpetrators. The rest of the film consists principally of Harry a) killing lots of nasty people, all of whom we are encouraged to condemn in a rather monochromatic fashion unpleasantly redolent of a Daily Mail rant, and b) effortlessly evading the ineffectual gropings of the local police force, almost none of whom can believe that an emphysemic pensioner might be their very own wax-jacketed crusader – the lady DI played by Emily Mortimer (who makes very good use of unfortunately clunking lines) can’t even convince her sardonic sergeant of Harry’s connection to the dead yobs on every corner, let along talk round the supercilious superintendent more concerned with the success of his high-impact Operation Bluejay and its potential effects on crime statistics in the area.
The main attraction of Harry Brown was always going to be Michael Caine’s performance, and he doesn’t disappoint for a moment. Displaying the talent for effortlessly embodying his characters which justifies his standing as one of the greatest living English actors, he single-handedly carries a plot which is unfailingly straight as an arrow and occasionally became predictable enough to need livening up with a gunshot or similar (I baptised my left sleeve with a perfectly adequate Beaujolais-Villages when a half-naked crackhead unexpectedly punched an unconscious, underage girl in the face), keeping the audience’s attention even when his appearances are juxtaposed with a roaring crowd of masked ne’er-do-wells with Molotov cocktails – in a world of deliberately one-dimensional characters, Harry is aglow with personality and is irresistible even when stabbing a beggar by a canal or dispassionately discussing the hole he’s just blown in a dealer’s stomach. I must confess that I left the cinema fretting a little over the potential echoes of truth in the story – the film, partially shot from camera phones and frequently leeched of colour, is presented in such a way as to suggest the ‘gritty realism’ of a docu-drama without claiming to be anything of the sort – but even if the estates of South London are urban utopiae, I can’t pretend Harry Brown has left me anything but shaken and nervous about leaving my W2 bourgeois stronghold. Harry’s nemeses may have been deliberately crafted to deflect empathy, but it’s worth remembering that faceless villains with no character development don’t normally present us with a problem – when was the last time you watched a news report of an inner city stabbing and pondered the background of the murderer? Perhaps director Daniel Barber has noticed that if we’ve got a sideline to boo from, we’re not really fussed.
Following on from the beautifully crafted dementia comedy of Is Anybody There?, released earlier this year, this film slips Caine into a character close to the role of an enlisted man which he originally coveted in Zulu, playing a widowed ex-Marine languishing in a south-of-the-river estate full of drugs, guns, and youths too keen on both. When his last remaining friend (who it’s hard to pity too much once you realise that he also played that mental caretaker in Harry Potter) falls prey to the gang which loiters in a local underpass, Harry Brown straps on his badman boots and goes after the perpetrators. The rest of the film consists principally of Harry a) killing lots of nasty people, all of whom we are encouraged to condemn in a rather monochromatic fashion unpleasantly redolent of a Daily Mail rant, and b) effortlessly evading the ineffectual gropings of the local police force, almost none of whom can believe that an emphysemic pensioner might be their very own wax-jacketed crusader – the lady DI played by Emily Mortimer (who makes very good use of unfortunately clunking lines) can’t even convince her sardonic sergeant of Harry’s connection to the dead yobs on every corner, let along talk round the supercilious superintendent more concerned with the success of his high-impact Operation Bluejay and its potential effects on crime statistics in the area.
The main attraction of Harry Brown was always going to be Michael Caine’s performance, and he doesn’t disappoint for a moment. Displaying the talent for effortlessly embodying his characters which justifies his standing as one of the greatest living English actors, he single-handedly carries a plot which is unfailingly straight as an arrow and occasionally became predictable enough to need livening up with a gunshot or similar (I baptised my left sleeve with a perfectly adequate Beaujolais-Villages when a half-naked crackhead unexpectedly punched an unconscious, underage girl in the face), keeping the audience’s attention even when his appearances are juxtaposed with a roaring crowd of masked ne’er-do-wells with Molotov cocktails – in a world of deliberately one-dimensional characters, Harry is aglow with personality and is irresistible even when stabbing a beggar by a canal or dispassionately discussing the hole he’s just blown in a dealer’s stomach. I must confess that I left the cinema fretting a little over the potential echoes of truth in the story – the film, partially shot from camera phones and frequently leeched of colour, is presented in such a way as to suggest the ‘gritty realism’ of a docu-drama without claiming to be anything of the sort – but even if the estates of South London are urban utopiae, I can’t pretend Harry Brown has left me anything but shaken and nervous about leaving my W2 bourgeois stronghold. Harry’s nemeses may have been deliberately crafted to deflect empathy, but it’s worth remembering that faceless villains with no character development don’t normally present us with a problem – when was the last time you watched a news report of an inner city stabbing and pondered the background of the murderer? Perhaps director Daniel Barber has noticed that if we’ve got a sideline to boo from, we’re not really fussed.
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