Harry Brown

Just as every action movie star feels the need to make a comedy, like Sylvester Stallone doing Oscar or Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Junior – every action star, if they live to be old enough to still be making movies in their golden years, wants to make a grumpy old man revenge movie. Charles Bronson did Death Wish. Clint Eastwood did Gran Torino. Now Michael Caine has given fans his version of the angry old man movie, Harry Brown, a gritty thriller about a lonely guy living in fear in a rundown British council flat. Caine, who has spent the last few years living in Batman’s shadow playing Alfred the Butler, seems to relish the chance to really dig in and play the part of Harry Brown. The film gives him just enough time to establish how fearful Brown’s life has become before turning him loose on the world. But Harry Brown isn’t a simple revenge film, and it’s certainly not designed to make you cheer as Brown battles the punks who killed his friends. Like Eastwood’s epic western, The Undefeated, Harry Brown is a meditation on violence, not a celebration of it, and it is by avoiding the clichés of the usual revenge movie that Harry Brown gains the resonance that stays with you long after you’ve left the theater.