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Coming only two weeks after the release of Kick-Ass, a work of astonishing cowardice, Matthew Vaughn signs his name to yet another tale of an unlikely vigilante with Harry Brown. He's only a producer this time, but you wouldn't know it from the way debuting director Daniel Barber details the crusade waged against a gang of drug-dealing, homicidal teens in South London by a widowed ex-Royal Marine. In their relatively unburdened legitimizing of violence and feral ineptitude, both Brown and Kick-Ass are of a particularly vile ilk that feigns complexity while indulging in every rote cliché for which their respective genres are known.
The chess games that the titular pensioner (Michael Caine) plays with his buddy Lenny (David Bradley) are just one of a slew of totems that have been run ragged and, in the case of chess, lent blithe metaphorical relevance in cat-and-mouse films. These games at a local pub are Harry's singular routine after he loses his beloved wife; unable to use an underpass ruled by a local gang, he isn't even allowed to say a proper goodbye. Still, it's not until Lenny is gruesomely murdered that Harry decides to take action. Intermittently questioned by a soft-spoken but focused police investigator (Emily Mortimer), Harry goes about shooting and stabbing his way through the gang members implicit in Lenny's death while also uncovering a small-time drug ring.
Caine imbues the material with a certain class: He has been the most professional player in the room for over a decade now, roughly since he won an Oscar for rendering The Cider House Rules tolerable. But those expecting the sort of challenging autumnal roles that Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino) and Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) have undertaken will not find such depth in Caine's latest performance, as efficient as it is. And they certainly will find nothing as unsafe and masterfully crafted as either of those films in Barber's complacent aesthetic.
Neither hyperbolic comment on fear of youth nor a tough-minded portrait of South London's rotted "estates," Harry Brown eventually reveals itself to be a deeply conservative single-note exercise in self-righteous justice, as unfettered by its cruel and uncomplicated politics as any of its Death Wish forbears. Brown's attitude towards his violent acts are seen as a dutiful jostling of the youth's detached attitude towards mortality; not for nothing is Lenny's murder captured and broadcast through a cell phone. But the film's fatal hypocrisy is that Harry's similar detachment to his own acts lacks lachrymose contemplation or, to go the other way, gleeful sadism. Either track would have roused at least a little fascination, but the lugubrious Harry Brown assures the audience that any intellectual stimulation can be dwarfed by the image of a teenager having his head blown off.
The chess games that the titular pensioner (Michael Caine) plays with his buddy Lenny (David Bradley) are just one of a slew of totems that have been run ragged and, in the case of chess, lent blithe metaphorical relevance in cat-and-mouse films. These games at a local pub are Harry's singular routine after he loses his beloved wife; unable to use an underpass ruled by a local gang, he isn't even allowed to say a proper goodbye. Still, it's not until Lenny is gruesomely murdered that Harry decides to take action. Intermittently questioned by a soft-spoken but focused police investigator (Emily Mortimer), Harry goes about shooting and stabbing his way through the gang members implicit in Lenny's death while also uncovering a small-time drug ring.
Caine imbues the material with a certain class: He has been the most professional player in the room for over a decade now, roughly since he won an Oscar for rendering The Cider House Rules tolerable. But those expecting the sort of challenging autumnal roles that Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino) and Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) have undertaken will not find such depth in Caine's latest performance, as efficient as it is. And they certainly will find nothing as unsafe and masterfully crafted as either of those films in Barber's complacent aesthetic.
Neither hyperbolic comment on fear of youth nor a tough-minded portrait of South London's rotted "estates," Harry Brown eventually reveals itself to be a deeply conservative single-note exercise in self-righteous justice, as unfettered by its cruel and uncomplicated politics as any of its Death Wish forbears. Brown's attitude towards his violent acts are seen as a dutiful jostling of the youth's detached attitude towards mortality; not for nothing is Lenny's murder captured and broadcast through a cell phone. But the film's fatal hypocrisy is that Harry's similar detachment to his own acts lacks lachrymose contemplation or, to go the other way, gleeful sadism. Either track would have roused at least a little fascination, but the lugubrious Harry Brown assures the audience that any intellectual stimulation can be dwarfed by the image of a teenager having his head blown off.
