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| Harry Brown (18)
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Dir. Daniel Barber, UK, 2009, 103 mins
Cast: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Iain Glen
Review by Carol Allen
This is an impressive feature film debut by director Daniel Barber with a very well written script by Gary Young, which tackles some uncomfortable issues, such as drug culture, gun crime and the fear of violence from young people that many elderly people experience.
Harry Brown (Caine) is an apparently lonely and harmless elderly widower living on a grim council estate, the sort where people fear to walk alone at night. There is an almost tangible menace emanating from the nearby tunnel under the road, where the youngsters hang out and which everyone else avoids and when a car on the estate is brazenly vandalised, no-one even bothers to call the police. But when Harry's only friend Leonard (David Bradley) is murdered by a gang of young thugs and the police are powerless to act, Harry's past persona as a tough Marine comes to the fore and he sets out to dispense his own brand of justice.
Although this is very violent film at times, as Harry battles his way through an underworld dominated by drugs and guns, it first takes time and care to establish Harry's life and his character - his past, the loss of his wife, the everyday details of his life, the estate itself and his friendship with Leonard, so that by the time he sets out on his mission, we know and like him. Caine is terrific – one of the few elderly actors, who can convince as a pensioner vigilante without the idea seeming ridiculous. The character's whole life is in his face. While the basic premise might seem at first thought unlikely, it convinces because of Caine's performance and though the vigilante philosophy is arguably morally suspect, one is emotionally very much on Harry's side. Pensioners in fact might well find themselves cheering him on as their champion. Bradley too is very good as the frail and frightened Leonard, Mortimer interesting as the police inspector, who is torn two ways between the rules of her job and her liking laced with growing suspicion of Harry and Ian Glenn appropriately dislikable as her careerist and publicity conscious superior.
The plot is well worked out and the film is extremely well directed, for example in its effective use of close ups to draw our attention to details, be it the mundane and restricted nature of Harry's life in the early part of the film or the more overtly dramatic action scenes later on. There's one particularly outstanding and edge of the seat sequence, where Harry has a face off with the very scary junkie king of an indoor marijuana jungle in an effort to save the life of a young woman, who is dying of a drugs overdose.
Much of the film was shot on location in and around the Elephant and Castle area of London, which gives it an air of authenticity and this is a totally engrossing thriller, which tackles some hard contemporary issues with intelligence.
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