“Harry Brown,” the debut film from Daniel Barber, is a relentlessly grim revenge thriller in which Michael Caine, rocked by the death of his wife and the murder of his best friend/chess buddy, goes on, in the words of Earl McGraw, a kill crazy rampage at the low rent housing estate where he lives. The movie leaves you with a lot of questions, but first and foremost, you wonder why? Why would this elderly man take up vigilantism when he could just as easily be playing bridge? Maybe he saw “The Brave One” on cable and felt inspired.
But all snark aside (well, maybe not all), “Harry Brown” is a relatively respectable little thriller. It’s just that in its attempt to be both a rah-rah revenge picture and one that actually investigates, with some depth, the socio-political underpinnings of these estate housing complexes, it ends up being neither. It’s far too shallow to offer any actual social critique and too glumly entrenched in the poverty and despair of the region to ever let loose and deliver the cathartic, wish-fulfillment fun that these types of movies are supposed to provide.
It doesn’t help matters that the narrative is so scattershot. We open with some shaky handheld digital photography of a couple of punks (“hoodies” as they’re known in England) as they smoke crack and ride around on a motorcycle, firing a gun at a young woman and her baby. They ultimately kill the woman (in a blooming flower of computer generated blood) and take off, themselves getting run over by a large truck. This you-are-there approach to the material is all well and good and makes for a reasonably engaging opening. But after that, we get down to the meat of the story: Michael Caine, elderly military man, visiting his ailing wife in the hospital. The two plot threads couldn’t be more different and by the time a third stand is added, the movie starts to sag under its own weight.
He plays chess with his friend Leonard (David Bradley), who complains about the hoodies’ constant harassment and drinks at the pub, owned by a man (Liam Cunningham) who may be complicit with the hoodies’ nefarious goings-on (drug deals, attacks, etc). One night Caine gets a call from the hospital: his wife is dying. He runs out of his apartment and can’t take the shortcut, through a darkened tunnel, because he knows that the gang members will be there, ready to jump him (or worse). He gets to the hospital, but she’s already passed on.
Several days later, Leonard is stabbed to death in the same underpass that Caine shied away from the night of his wife’s death. A pair of police officers (Charlie Creed Miles and the always lovely Emily Mortimer) come to Caine’s apartment, investigating Leonard’s death, but Caine sums them up immediately as inefficient. (The third plot element in the cluttered narrative is the pair of cops’ storyline and the result is unnecessary and overlong.) Things are compounded when, one day, Caine looks out his window to see a young couple violently harassed by the thugs.
Something clicks; something has to be done. After all, he is Carter.
And so the “revenging” section of the movie begins, with Caine taking down a drug dealer, ensconced in a fantasy version of what a drug dealer’s apartment looks like (complete with “Pineapple Express”-ian groves of marijuana plants), as well as several other thugs. At one point he kidnaps and intimidates a hoodie and it looks for a moment like the movie will veer off into Eli Roth-sanctioned torture porn. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen. But the mood remains solemn, up until the preposterous climax wherein a full-scale riot breaks out between the British police and roving packs of estate hoods. This climax could have been powerful if it wasn’t shot with such action movie brio. It’s trying to be exciting without ever pausing to be informative.
The movie isn’t out-and-out bad, necessarily. Caine’s perfectly modulated performance goes a long way in overlooking other things (like how deadly little Emily Mortimer has to do). As a man gripped both by grief and vengeance, it’s a hard thing to play, but he does it wonderfully. Look no further than Mel Gibson’s performance earlier this year in the laughably bad “Edge of Darkness” to see how far awry things can go. Caine’s performance, coupled with a booming score (by the team of Martin Phipps, Pete Tong, Ruth Barrett and Paul Rogers) that blurs the line between soundtrack and sound design, means that there are a handful of heady, tension-filled sequences.
It’s just that, “Harry Brown” as a whole, acting as neither social commentary or righteous retribution thriller, uncomfortably settles for the in between: a dank looking (and feeling) suspense picture that seems to have more on its mind than it ever really discloses. There are a few kicky thrills to be had along the way, but on the whole the movie feels like your typical revenge quest: unsatisfying and ultimately meaningless. [C+]
–Written by Drew
