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After a long run of baroquely plotted crime dramas like Layer Cake and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, it's a little depressing to come across a vigilante drama whose sole twist is its protagonist's advanced age.
It's simply the tale of a man who decides to do something and sticks to his guns, so to speak. That the man is played by Michael Caine is what makes it worthwhile.
On one side, it's all compellingly believable; on the other, it's simply incredible. We do our best to straddle the rift but, in the end, the gulf proves too wide, the contrast too great, and a tumbling movie takes us down with it.
The film ranks right up there with Sleuth, Get Carter and Mona Lisa as being amongst Caineâ(TM)s toughest and best performances.
In Gran Torino, Eastwood took on the moral issues that screenwriter Gary Young and first-time director Daniel Barber studiously avoid. It's the difference between riveting and repellent.
Such familiarity can breed contempt among all but the most bloodthirsty, and it would in Harry Brown as well if not for Caine, who somehow breathes life into the most cardboard of characters.
By the end, it's turned from a geriatric Death Wish into a one-dimensional Taxi Driver...
The fact that he was trained to deal with violence in Ireland plays into his character, and the murky moral and political shadings the story takes on.
"[Caine] elevates this grim vigilante-fest from pretty darn good to essential viewing."
Although Caine lives up to expectations in this nicely crafted (though violent) film, the oversimplified story he's given to work with keeps it from the top of Caine's impressive filmography.
Caine's geriatric slasher may have gripes against UK youngsters with bad behavior. But the 'don't trust anyone under thirty' carnage, is really not the role model example that the elders should be setting, by killing 'em all and sorting 'em out later.
Harry Brown is a more meditative take on garden variety exploitation, but its attraction lies in the same guilty pleasure centers of the brain that exult in a kind of movie violence that is the very opposite of senseless.
Caine, that master of gentle sadness, lets us know Harry immediately as a good man trying to get by -- and trying to understand what seems like madness.
A very good film -- albeit very violent and bloody -- and contains yet another splendid Michael Caine performance. I'm not complaining too much based on those grounds alone.
Maybe Michael Caine just wanted to make his "death wish" before kickin' his "bucket list." Say what you wanna say, but I'd rather watch old-timers bust gums than tandem parachute with Morgan Freeman while John Mayer plays softly in the background.
In the hands of a lesser actor, this would feel just as clichéd as it sounds. But Caine brings his smarts as well as his baggage to the character, making him more than another mad-as-hell guy with a gun.
A revenge fantasy that recalls the Charles Bronson Death Wish series and Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, Daniel ... would be unremarkable if not for the grave, lowered gaze of Michael Caine and the relentless grittiness of its cinematography.
Forget those boring, ludicrously overpriced, would-be summer blockbusters and go see the art of vigilante-movie-making done to a fare-thee-well. Caine's Harry makes bad-boy Russell Crowe's Robin Hood look like a sissy.
This latest in the slumming mini-genre offers a couple of new wrinkles: Michael Caine and self-righteous, soul-satisfying vigilante justice.
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