By no means a particularly good movie, this British vigilante flick is better than the first ten minutes promises. There really is only one reason to watch it: Michael Caine (like Terrance Stamp, this is someone I will watch in even the worst movies) playing a role a lot closer to that of the cynical spy, Harry Palmer, that he played in the Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin.
The movie is set on a crumbling public housing estate in London (funding came from Britain’s National Lottery) which is portrayed as terrorized by brutal thugs. This is the worst, least realistic part of the setup and it produces some stupid scenes of hopped up “hoodies” randomly beating up and shooting passers’ by. Enter elderly widower, Harry Brown, who had some dark past in the Royal Marines, working in Northern Ireland, but who has tried to put his own violent past behind him. his wife dies and his best friend is killed by the thugs. Brown takes revenge, slowly at first, but with increasing ferocity.
Much of the movie is stupid and overwrought, but Caine does give it moments of real intensity as his face remains impassive but something seems to crumble beneath the surface. He never tries to become Charles Bronson, in fact one scene has him collapsing from his emphysema while pursuing one of the murderers. He simply plays what he is: an elderly man, with some weapons training and a sense of loss, not just of his family and friends but of an earlier, different sort of community. There are a couple of good scenes that were cut and only appear in the special features, including one in which he talks about the character of chess pieces; it has some resonance with the similar scene in the first season of The Wire. Perhaps only worthwhile as an exercise in nostalgia for early Michael Caine, but not a total waste.
Chris–is the performance something like that from the great gangster film Get Carter,where Caine is also impassive while suggesting some kind of inner devastation? I would put that film along with Bullitt and Point Blank as one of the great nearly non-speaking parts.
No, it is not that good; Caine’s performance in Get Carter is just fucking great. That must be the only movie I still own on VHS. Time to find a good DVD version. But his performance in this is well above average.
Chris, how’d you get those cool little black dots on your post?
By messing around. A couple of months back I discovered that just pressing enter no longer created a line break. I couldn’t even type up posts elsewhere and cut and paste them. I don’t know why WordPress no longer operated the same way for me. My posts were all one big paragraph. But you can insert line breaks by using the code in the edit box: li or /li I think.
Unfortunately the Get Carter DVD is bare bones…it’s time for it to get the Criterion treatment.
this is an unpleasant piece of work. and it’s a particularly strange experience watching it after last year’s riots in england.