Michael Caine as Harry Brown: "I'll blow your brains out if you tell me I'm too old for this crap again"

Cast: Sir Michael Caine. Emily Mortimer, Liam Cunningham, David Bradley
Director: Daniel Barber
Screenwriter: Gary Young

Caine’s restrained performance lifts this otherwise nasty, glum and pretentious vigilante flick.

Harry Brown is a pensioner living on a council estate overrun by chavs. He has to take a longer route to visit his dying wife in hospital because the subway is a hangout for more chavs, and his only pleasure in life is a pint and a game of chess with pal Leonard (Bradley), who’s also being terrorised by chavs. When Leonard is killed in the subway after confronting the youths, Harry decides to take matters into his own hands. Good job he’s an ex-Marine then, eh?

The film doesn’t know whether it wants to be an exploitation vigilante movie like Death Wish, a glossy vigilante thriller like Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One, or a low-key, thoughtful vigilante film like Gran Torino. In the latter, the message was that violence is wrong because it affects both the perpetrators and the victims. In Harry Brown, the message is all council estate kids are druggies or psychopaths, and the only way to deal with them is to wipe them all out rather than tackle issues such as bad parenting or class division. For all its Daily Mail-hysteria, even the horror film Eden Lake managed to hint at a lack of parental responsibility for children going ‘bad’.

The film’s ponderous pace is presumably designed to lend the film a gravitas it definitely doesn’t deserve or earn, but all it does is make each plot development more ludicrous. Harry’s attempt to buy a gun in a drug den is tense, yes, yet also laughable in the sleazy depiction of the dealers. A sorely miscast Emily Mortimer as a copper who becomes suspicious of Harry looks like she came straight from the set of The Bill. The police’s handling of the council estate riot at the end of the film is plain daft. And the bad guy reveal and subsequent attempts to kill Harry and two coppers is preposterous.

Other than Caine’s dignified turn, there’s no reason to see Harry Brown. If you think all council estate kids are feral and irredeemable then this will merely confirm your view, and there’s no attempt to challenge this notion or even address the issues why it may be true. A dangerous film, but not for the right reasons.

Harry Brown is in cinemas now via Lionsgate