Harry Brown is a great example of a good film going bad due to a lousy scrip, or at least a script that takes a bad turn. It begins as a moody and quiet story of an old pensioner, Harry (Michael Caine) living in a public housing project in England. Every day he visits his sick wife in the hospital and goes to the pub to see his best friend Leonard (David Bradley, who was also wonderful in Another Year). The two commiserate about how the kids who live in the estate are terrible and make them feel unsafe. It seems there are a few gangs and a few drug dealers who operate out of the complex and the teens who hang around them harass and threaten the older folks on their way to and from their errands.
Leonard is sick of these kids and talks back to them and they in turn set his flat on fire. He then confronts them and is killed in the fight that follows. This makes Harry furious, of course, and when the cops come to interview him (the lead detective is played by Emily Mortimer), he lets them know he's lost faith in their ability to protect and defend him. The cops have left this project for dead and aren't doing much of anything to control the kids in this area. Seeing no other option, Harry goes wild and starts killing the gang members and drug dealers himself.
What starts as in interesting and small atmospheric piece turns into a silly and bloody vengeance story that leaps off a cliff. The cops are totally useless and uncaring, which might be a convenient plot device, but nothing that I connect to reality. When the teens start a riot in the streets (which basically comes out of nowhere with no motivation) the cops do almost nothing to stop them and are beaten because they only send four officers to control the mob.
Add to this the very binary characters who are either good or bad and sometimes switch states. Harry and Leonard are clearly good, the kids drug dealers are clearly bad, the pub owner is good, but then turns bad, Mortimer is good, but the other cops are bad. It's all rather dull and overdone.
Caine gives good performance here, but it feels like roles he's played before (nice lower-middle class guy who has a rough life and goes violent). I like the blue-green palette of the film and how it informs our idea of this world we're in, but it's a bit banal, isn't it? I mean blue-green stuff looks sad. That's boring. This film would have been much better if it had a different second half. It all comes about too suddenly and melodramatically. I wish it had been more melancholy and thinky and less actively violent.
Stars: 2 of 4
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