Movie Review: Harry Brown

“Look, man, I really don’t recommend that you watch this movie…”

Twice now I’ve prefaced referring to scenes from Harry Brown with that statement, and each time it has encouraged interest in this film.

Now, I think I can recommend that you see this movie. Here’s why:

Lacordaire once said that no virtue is irresistible until it is seen as beautiful. That is why good art is art that reveals the beauty of virtue. So, too, I think it can be said that good art can also be good if it reveals the ugliness of vice. This is why horror can be a very legitimate artform, it makes evil look evil. It shows the dark side of human nature as so repellent that you feel compelled to avoid it.

Harry Brown is a horror movie.

Michael Caine plays Harry Brown, a retired Royal Marine who spends his days in one of the ugly housing estates that surround European capitals that tourists never really see. The whole environment is repulsive, Labour’s New Jerusalem on display sixty years on. The buildings are ugly, the inhabitants are vile, and violence is pervasive. Sitting in possibly the most dismal pub ever to make it onscreen, Harry’s best friend and fellow pensioner starts to reveal that something is wrong. He is being terrorized by “youths” on the estate. Insults, excrement related practical jokes and a very real physical threat to his person have started to dominate his mind. He reveals that he has obtained an old army bayonet for protection. Harry tries to convince him to get rid of it, that it’s not going to help matters.

In a way, Harry is right. Too old and feeble to use the bayonet to defend himself, Harry’s best friend is ultimately stabbed to death with it in a tunnel. Yet another onscreen crime that the police seem all too ill equipped to really handle. Harry Brown doesn’t really become a vigilante at this point, a small distinction that I think adds to the realism. Harry is not an unhinged guy. He doesn’t do the standard shlock cinema “I will avenge you!” thing. He mourns his loss, is troubled, and tries to move on.

Until late one night, a junky sticks a knife in his face, the old military training takes over and Harry kills him. It’s as if he thinks “Maybe I could make a go at this…”

Harry Brown is a horror movie, and what I just described is not nearly the grittiest or nastiest part of this film. All of the really gritty and nasty parts are, however, not sadistic, I think. They are there to be gritty and nasty. They don’t invite the viewer into some sick vicarious pleasure like a slasher film, but as a vicarious experience of depravity viewed through the eyes of honorable Harry Brown.

A strange effect of this movie is that any attempt to draw in the standard pop culture platitudes about the various kinds of lowlife villains presented really falls flat. Presented with Harry Brown’s enemies it is virtually impossible to sympathize with almost any of them. These aren’t misguided youths that can be saved by a better educational program; they are the free, conscious, and deliberate servants of evil. These are the kinds of men that the gallows was invented for.

Only really one time onscreen does the movie really attempt to undermine Harry’s vigilantism, when one of the police officers starts to offer the same tired old “cycle of violence” reasoning. Unsaid by the movie, but not by this viewer, is I know how it ends when good men don’t fight back. It ends in a pensioner being stabbed to death in a tunnel.

It is possible that I’m taking a b-movie actioner and turning it into something it’s not. That being said, it just doesn’t seem that way to me. This movie makes too many choices that separate it from the pack. For one thing, this is a revenge film where the protagonist in an emphysema ridden old man. The action seems actually pretty realistic. No firing two guns whilst flying in the air, no drawn out hand to hand combat. Either it’s over with in a flash or its chaos.

The value of this movie is not as a steady diet, or even entertainment, properly speaking. It is that this is a movie that really believes in evil. Really believes in it. The value is that it wakes you up to the idea that there really is a battle between good and evil, that it is serious, and that it can be closer to home than any of us realize.