September 24, 2010: Harry Brown
I saw previews for Harry Brown but didn’t manage to see it in the theatre. No matter, it plays just fine on the small screen. I knew from the trailer that it would be a total guilty pleasure movie, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
The title character is played by Michael Caine. Harry Brown is an old man living in a crowded low-income housing apartment complex in the outskirts of London. He goes about his daily business, which includes seeing his best friend down at the pub for a game of chess every afternoon. The gang violence in the complex is getting out of control, with a pedestrian walkway under a busy street having been established as their territory as they harass anyone who goes through, including these innocent old men. When Harry’s friend decides to strike back at these kids, things don’t go so well and the old man is killed. But nobody realizes that Harry Brown is a former special ops soldier, and he’s not going to let his friend’s death go unavenged. This is where the film takes off, giving the audience what they came to see.
There are a few points which elevate this above the typical murder-revenge fantasy movie. Of course Harry does what we all sometimes wish we could do – go around shooting and killing a bunch of aggressive nasty kids to “teach them a lesson”. It’s easy to believe, too, that a guy with nothing more to lose could take this stand, since he can shoulder the consequences. But the way it plays out is more realistic than we typically see in such films, and I think that brings much more power to the story. Harry Brown is a former soldier, yes, but he’s going on 80 years old now, so he can’t really chase these punks, and he occasionally runs out of breath and needs to drop to his knees, which impedes his ability to chase them or to escape police attention. This is in stark contrast with The Rock (1996), in which an aging Sean Connery goes from rotting in jail for 30 years to deftly steering a Hummer through the streets of San Francisco to evade his FBI pursuers, and then wriggles through the narrow back passages of Alcatraz with a bunch of Navy SEALs. The interactions between Harry and a police detective played by Emily Mortimer are also a delight to see, since Harry is clearly holding back some information and she clearly knows it, but their verbal jousting is desperate and awkward as it would be in real life, rather than the silver-tongued back-and-forth we often see in such films. By the way, this is the second film in a row that I’ve seen with Emily Mortimer, playing an American in Redbelt (2008) and going back to her native British accent for this film. She strikes me as a bit uneven here, which is unfortunate, as she deals with Harry as well as her doubting partner on the job.
Harry Brown doesn’t try to be anything more than exactly what it says, and that works for me. That doesn’t make it a masterpiece by any means, but it was a nice time killer for me, and I’m always happy to see two-time Oscar winner Michael Caine continue to ply his craft.
A guilty pleasure all the way.
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