Ad director Daniel Barber's debut feature is an amazingly accomplished, genre-bending thriller set upon the lawless wastes of a modern British housing estate.
The film finds that elusive 'magic' zone between grittily real and exhilaratingly cinematic. This is a heightened reality, where a thug can embody everything rotten with the British underbelly: dealer, rapist, and psychotic gun-runner. But the reaction of Michael Caine's eponymous anti-hero is equally exaggerated: from peaceful pensioner to pistoleer sheriff in a matter of days. A brief backstory about his time in the Marines provides faint validation - like wondering what war the Man With No Name just stepped out of.
Barber's film does what bold statements should do, insofar as it forces us to reconsider the principles that we so complacently construct for ourselves. We can easily watch a Western, for instance, taking it for granted that lawlessness breeds vile vigilantism. We can even revel in it. But transplanted to a modern setting, suddenly this brand of justice skids into a grey area. Harry Brown provides the guilty pleasures of the zero-tolerance peacekeeping practices of the lone frontier lawman without the comforting buffer of 130-odd years.
It's by no means perfect. The police investigation scenes lack the sharpness and immediacy of the estate scenes. And the revelation involving Liam Cunnigham's Sid sets up too neat and stagey a climax - surely an unnecessary twist in an otherwise brutally flat narrative fabric. And, as I'm sure Barber and screenwriter Gary Young were well aware when making it, it's not always clear which faction the filmmakers are seeking to decry.
But to come away from a film feeling exhilarated and guilty and uncertain is a rare thing; and it's most welcome.
The film finds that elusive 'magic' zone between grittily real and exhilaratingly cinematic. This is a heightened reality, where a thug can embody everything rotten with the British underbelly: dealer, rapist, and psychotic gun-runner. But the reaction of Michael Caine's eponymous anti-hero is equally exaggerated: from peaceful pensioner to pistoleer sheriff in a matter of days. A brief backstory about his time in the Marines provides faint validation - like wondering what war the Man With No Name just stepped out of.
Barber's film does what bold statements should do, insofar as it forces us to reconsider the principles that we so complacently construct for ourselves. We can easily watch a Western, for instance, taking it for granted that lawlessness breeds vile vigilantism. We can even revel in it. But transplanted to a modern setting, suddenly this brand of justice skids into a grey area. Harry Brown provides the guilty pleasures of the zero-tolerance peacekeeping practices of the lone frontier lawman without the comforting buffer of 130-odd years.
It's by no means perfect. The police investigation scenes lack the sharpness and immediacy of the estate scenes. And the revelation involving Liam Cunnigham's Sid sets up too neat and stagey a climax - surely an unnecessary twist in an otherwise brutally flat narrative fabric. And, as I'm sure Barber and screenwriter Gary Young were well aware when making it, it's not always clear which faction the filmmakers are seeking to decry.
But to come away from a film feeling exhilarated and guilty and uncertain is a rare thing; and it's most welcome.