AWSUM MOVIES: Harry Brown

AWSUM MOVIES:

Harry Brown

I never saw a Michael Cain film I didn’t like. He tends to make any film he’s involved in, credible. The same can be said of Harry Brown: Poor Harry, elderly and forgotten, lives in shit hole suburbia, a real life dystopia of brutalism concrete council estates that make 1984 look like a garden picnic. His life at best is misery and we haven’t even got to the gangs yet, which make any Death Wish contender look like the Smurfs. 

            Charles Bronson could certainly learn a thing or too off old Harry and certainly Michael Caine did too. "I am talking about kids who would scare the daylights out of you on any other occasion. But I came to realize they had been let down."  He said to The Telegraph. Reflecting on the system that has let these kids rot in council flats with little or no support. For Cain it is quiet a eye opener returning to these streets to do research for the part, surprised at how much the place had really changed: " When I grew up there it was tough and rough," he said. "But then it was alcohol and fights but now it is drugs and guns and knives and death."

Indeed, the area of Elephant and castle is not exactly the best place to raise kids or anyone.  I spent the best part of University, living and breathing the locations to which this film is devoted to and aesthetically, I had a hard time trying to see the place for anything more than what it is: Noisy, dull and depressing. It is not exactly the world of Harry Brown but it is a pretty close approximation of a community that has no community, where people live out their little lives stacked upon each other and seldom ever meet, unless they are forced to. Fortunately I saw little gang crime in the area, which is probably why I am alive to review this movie, which of course is what the whole point of these meanderings are all about.

Like Death Wish and a host of other vigilante films, Harry Brown is an enjoyable and intense drama that adheres to the code of the lone vigilante. Unassuming Harry goes about his days, washing dishes, staring into space and playing chess with his best mate Leonard down the local. But when his wife passes away and a gang kill Leonard, it’s about all Harry can take and he’s off doing what vigilantes do best: creaming scumbags.

And oh! the scumbags in this tale are just so totally unredeaming, making it all the more enjoyable when Harry meanders into their lives and finds himself sickened to the core by their endless and mindless depravity. We even get a bit of classic Michael Cain “not a lot of people know this but” as he stands over one dieing scumbag and confides in him about his Northern Island days fighting the IRA.

If you’ve not seen this gem then your missing a piece of cultural history probably happening out on your doorstep right now.

But don’t worry, Harrys on it.