DVD Review - HARRY BROWN - Crime Drama

Harry Brown (2009)

Dir. Daniel Barber

 

Few movies have excited me the way HARRY BROWN has. This is a tale of sadness and loss set against a backdrop of shocking violence sure to please any moviegoer with a yen for good story, great acting and disturbing violence. Veteran character actor Michael Caine is the titular Brown, a pensioner living in a bleak London housing estate. It is an area under siege by brutal thugs, perpetually wired and keen to kill. Daily hospital visits to his ailing wife, (whom he’d met during service as a Marine during the Troubles in Belfast) a love spanning some 50 years, are cut short by her quiet death. We also learn of his earlier loss of their young daughter in the directors scatter gun edit of her violent death early in the film, one that redefines the term “senseless”. The years of silent pain and loss are etched into Harry Brown’s face. Chess games with an old friend and a pint at the pub are all of Harry’s comings and goings. It is when these last bits of the life he knows are taken from him that Harry kicks back at the chaos around him. In committing an act of violence that surprises even himself, our man finds more than a few reasons to carry on amidst the savagery that is happening at point blank range in his tiny pocket of the world.

There have been more than a few films of late about revenge with a character falling back on the talents he swore he’d never uncork again. TAKEN comes to mind, as does the BOURNE TRILOGY, but HARRY BROWN balances on a different fulcrum. We aren’t given splashy edits and jump-cuts of his actions, Christ, he’s a septuagenarian! The tension rests on Harry in situations where he is so completely out of his element that either violent death or a failing heart have equal dominion. A nightmarish scene in a drug den rivals any event I’ve seen in a film for the tension alone. Had me absolutely riveted. The action in HARRY BROWN is sharp and bloody, while the scenes of dialogue have an honesty that only a veteran of well over 100 films can deliver

I don’t believe that in and amongst the DVD covers on the shelf right now, a picture of Michael Caine in a pea-coat looking dour, gun in hand will get many second glances but I urge fans of acting, action and dramatic anxiety to give it a shot. Besides, who the hell do I have to “do some business with” to gedda drink around here?

Trailer here!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOSfHFNlcI