On first inspection, Harry Brown presents itself as the British equivalent of Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Ex-military pensioner protagonist? Check. Disillusioned at the surrounding neighbourhood? Check. Spurned into vigilante action by a shocking event close to home? Check.
Being British, you can expect Harry Brown to be grimmer than its American counterpart, and to be well acted and well shot. Check on all three counts again. What you don’t expect from the normally-nuanced British is for their characters to be underdeveloped and largely two-dimensional, thus robbing the film of its potential full impact. Gran Torino succeeds because Eastwood’s Walt Kowlaski and the situation around him is what writing lecturers would refer to as ‘complicated’; war has made him racist, and he struggles to come to terms with living with good people of an ethnicity he’s been trained to hate. Caine’s Harry Brown is a good character played in typically beautiful fashion by Caine, but he’s too good, and his enemies are too horrid. The always excellent Sean Harris (you may remember him from his wonderful turn as troubled Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People) is almost comical as the utterly depraved dealer Stretch, and director Daniel Barber and actor Ben Drew have done well in creating one of the vilest antagonists put to recent cinema in Noel Winters. While this would make for an excellent action film villain, here it robs a socio-character piece such as Harry Brown from the tragedy writer Gary Young and Barber could have achieved with more rounded characters. In the end, we have a valiant effort that falls short of truly powerful revenge cinema.
