Harry Brown, a 2009 film starring Michael Caine, follows the classic vigilante plot. Caine's friend is killed by some local hooligans and Caine, who looks about 90 in this movie, begins offing them. The gimmick is that he is a former marine with experience fighting the IRA in Belfast, so he is handy with knife and gun.
I do like the genre, and this is a good example of it, but it isn't quite trashy enough to be really good. It is a movie that is too good for its own good. In other words, give me Charles Bronson in the Death Wish series. Emily Mortimer is very good as the cop who figures out what is happening.
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I watched this about the same time as I watched Gran Torino and it was interesting comparing these two iconic deadpan actors in not entirely dissimilar roles. Of the two Harry Brown is the grittier. Eastwood’s character has a lighter side whereas Caine’s is more withdrawn and disillusioned if not downright embittered. I have little doubt that the two actors could have swapped places and we would never notice the difference – Caine has no problems with humour in fact he cites Dirty Rotten Soundrels as his personal favourite of all his films, at least the one that was the most enjoyable to make. Death Wish is another film entirely making a meal out of the violence. Brian Garfield, who wrote the novel from which the film was adapted, didn’t like it at all; the film advocated vigilantism whereas his book did the opposite. The thing about the two later films is that what you remember in both instances in the quality of the acting and not the body count.
Good comparison. I guess the curmudgeon is an archetype. Caine does not seem physically powerful in Harry Brown. They make him as sickly as possible while still able to wreak carnage. I think Eastwood would have brought a different physicality to that role.
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