Harry Brown

See, I think I know why Harry Brown (or 'Arry Brown, to mimic the Caine accent) was made. Caine has obviously been playing Alfred in the successful Nolan directed Batman movies. And he must have been watching Christian Bale meaningfully mumbling his way through those films, and decided he wanted a bit of the action for himself. Of course, what any self-respecting film-maker should have said to Caine is "no" (or perhaps "you're a big man, but you're out of shape"). Instead, they decided to shun the moulded body armour and instead gave Caine a cardigan and a replica firearm. And so the utterly execrable Harry Brown was born.

The plot - such as it is - is simple. 'Arry Brown is a old man who used to be a Royal Marine. 'Arry lives in a housing estate so awful that you would probably emigrate to a war zone for a better life if you lived there. He has an old friend. Who gets murdered after trying to stab some feral fucking youths with a bayonet. 'Arry gets drunk, accidentally stabs a thieving junkie on his way home, and then becomes a vigilante extraordinaire. He is like a wheezy version of Paul Kersey. Or Rambo with a pot belly.

And so he goes around killing a group of chavs and hoodies who all seem to have decided how to act by watching Kidulthood over and over again. He is also pursued (in the loosest sense of the word) by two police officers - one of them a wankstain in a flat cap and with all the sensitivity of a pitbull, and the other a female Inspector who no doubt is meant to come across as thoughtful and intuitive but instead comes across as wet as bog paper that has been immersed in the loo. Oh, and he also kills a drug dealer who looks like Gollum and a drug dealer who looks like some twat out of Razorlight in order to save a junkie whore. And I am not disparaging the woman in question; the way her character is set up makes it clear she is both a junkie and a whore. Still, 'Arry sees something worth saving. Maybe it was the fact that she is choking on her own vomit as he offs her boyfriend. Who can tell what the logic is of a psychotic pensioner with a grudge?

And everything spirals to a deeply unconvincing climax in a pub where the wheezy 'Arry (who appears to have some form of emphysema that vanishes by the very end of the film) and the Keystone Kops without the charisma are menaced by the king chav and his uncle in the middle of the sort of riot we stopped having in this country back in the 1980s. Before everything turns out to be OK. For 'Arry, at least. Not for all of the dead people, though.

No doubt this was meant to be gritty. A sort of update of Get Carter for a generation now drawing their pensions. Unfortunately, it seems to think that characters sporting cliched accents and a certain level of visceral violence makes something gritty. It doesn't. It just makes it a late-night version of The Bill with hints of Last of the Summer Wine. See, for something to be gritty it also have to be vaguely realistic. Harry Brown not only stretches the bounds of credibility, but takes the boundaries of credibility to a bar for a drink, drugs it, then carves out its kidneys to sell on the black market and then leaves the boundaries of credibility for dead in a ditch. The Punisher was arguably less daft; it certainly had better characterisation. It you want to see something gritty, then go watch Scum or I.D. Harry Brown drifts into satire without realising it - which is the kiss of death for any "gritty" film.

Sorry, I should have put a spoiler warning at the beginning of this post. But trust me, the stupid fucks who made this film have already spoiled it far more than I ever could be by revealing elements of the "plot".