DANIEL BARBER’S HARRY BROWN — A REVIEW BY NICK CLEMENT

I’m a big fan of vigilante revenge movies. Harry Brown is a terrific example of an effective genre piece, stripped down to its base elements, shoving a nasty and grim narrative in our faces, and providing for an excellent performance from Michael Caine as a widowed Royal Marine veteran who becomes incensed over the violence and depravity lurking in the shadows of his hardscrabble neighborhood. He gets especially pissed off when his best friend is despicably murdered by a group of thugs. Aggressively directed by Daniel Barber from a ruthless screenplay by Gary Young, Harry Brown lives in the same world as potent flicks like Death Wish and Gran Torino, offering up a nasty set of violent showdowns that pit Caine against a series of young hoodlums, who are slinging drugs, murdering innocents, and showing a casual disregard for human decency. I get a charge out of seeing bad things happen to bad people, so a film like this one is right up my alley, playing to my primal instincts, allowing for amazing emotional catharsis as Caine dispatches one piece of human garbage after another. Emily Mortimer is solid as a local cop looking into the various crimes that feature in the hostile and angry story; there’s a bitterness that permeates almost every scene of this dark, sordid film. If you don’t get a charge out of seeing Caine taking out the trash, and make no mistake – the baddies in this film are ugly and BAD – then I’m not sure what to tell you. Extremely well written with great observations and insights into the damaged male psyche and directed with a violent urgency that compliments the slow-burn nature of Caine’s work and Young’s hard-charging script in general, Harry Brown will make you sit up and take notice, as it’s a film that shows you societal ugliness right up front, never taking the audience out of the grips of a brooding, sometimes nightmarish scenario where anyone is fair game. A pre-Unbroken/Starred Up/’71 Jack O’Connell has an small but impressive role as one of the weaker hoodlums, who becomes prey to Caine’s unrelenting sense of vengeance.