The opening sets a queasy tone, as a would-be gang member on a motorcycle, cell-phone camera in hand, guns down a mother pushing a baby stroller. Initiation rituals like these are part of the cancer that’s metastasized around a crumbling South London apartment complex where violent, drug-dealing young thugs hold sway over terrorized residents while the police do nothing. Caine, an elderly former Royal Marine, commiserates with his friend David Bradley over the rise in crime, but advises him against taking the law into his own hands. When Bradley ignores his warning and pays the price, Caine finds his pleas for justice unsatisfactorily answered, so he calls on atrophied ass-kicking skills to get the job done. Emily Mortimer plays a sympathetic investigator who works to talk him off the ledge.
Director Daniel Barber keeps the tone muted and serious, and Mortimer’s turn as a crying-on-the-outside type of detective is unusual and oddly affecting just because of the way it plays against how seen-it-all authority types usually act. But no effort is made to question Caine’s thin justification for taking action—the law, as represented by Mortimer, does not necessarily fail—and the hoods are realized with no more complexity than a pack of unchained pit bulls. Harry Brown hacks up images of half-dead junkies and marijuana forests at random in a sweeping indictment of indulgent, amoral, directionless kids, but it can’t be bothered to dig any deeper than that. Put an actor of lesser bona fides in Caine’s role, amp up the pulp a little, and the film would be grindhouse trash; as is, it’s ready for the arthouse.
