No Ordinary Fool

This is social realism ageing Batman-style, as Michael Caine plays a senior citizen who snaps one day and decides to get seriously medieval on the asses of some loathsome yobbos and junkies. To desensitise the audience for what is to follow, though, there is a whole litany of sordid scenes involving drugs, beatings, intimidation, murder, guns, sexual assault, vandalism, and any amount of foul-mouthed invective. The conclusions that we are being begged to accept here are that Britain’s sink estates are both utterly lawless and entirely beyond redemption and that the police are mere bumbling brutes who do not do enough to protect the decent folk who are forced to live in these places.

Of course, this all sounds like the sort of comic-book urban dystopia that gets cooked up for nonsense films such as Escape from New York. That said, most of the scenes could just as easily have been plucked from the pages of the eternally ludicrous Daily Mail (and it comes as no real surprise that the newspaper’s film critic manages to mangle his way to a positive assessment of it all). This is a shame, as the social problems being depicted here should not need such crass exaggeration in order to command our attention. Moreover, the notion of a cold-blooded, chivalrous, and geriatric vigilante with emphysema, who is not being played for laughs, is probably best considered with a bagful of sodium chloride at the ready.

That said, Caine is as masterful as ever in the titular role, really embodying each of the emotions that he is asked to portray here. While Harry Brown’s complexities as a character may be disappointingly underwritten, Caine plays the role with sufficient understatement to still make the former reasonably credible. Alongside him then and despite representing the first real sign that the film is about to shoot off around the S-bend, Sean Harris puts in a bizarrely memorable cameo as the scarred and scrawny guns-and-drugs-dealing junkie, pimp, and pornographer Stretch. Ben Drew is robust enough as the snarling thug Noel, whilst Emily Mortimer and Iain Glen also do justice to their stock characters.

Equally, it has to be acknowledged that first-time director Daniel Barber and screenwriter Gary Young do know how to make a gritty and pulsating thriller that is fuelled by some fizzing in-your-face dialogue. The bright lights of Hollywood surely beckon now for the pair of them.

However, towards the end of the film, DS Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles) gets to the heart of the matter when he rhetorically asks if Harry Brown would be doing the police a favour if he got rid of the “cunt” Noel, who had a “cunt of a father” and will otherwise go on to have “cunt kids”. While Hicock need not expect any humanitarian-of-the-year awards for his sentiments, he does have a point. How do you break the generational cycle of kids who grow up virtually predestined to be gangsters, junkies, and thugs? The epilogue quietly lauds one possible outcome. However, if this really is what civilization now amounts to, then we have failed and failed utterly.