Or maybe that’s how all the British bobbies are now. Emily Mortimer, the daughter of the greatly beloved creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, plays Detective Frampton, certainly filled with empathy for Brown – she goes herself to tell him the news of his friend’s death – but she is entirely out of her league in questioning the usual suspects. But it is the vacuum set up by the well meaning but ineffectual police that sets up his situation. When his wife dies, and then Leonard is killed by these thugs, who christen their act by urinating on him, something in Harry snaps. His one respite is his daily chess game with his best friend Leonard, who confesses to him that he lives his life in fear of the thugs who seem to get a large portion of their jollies harassing him. He avoids the tunnel pass under the highway, the hangout of the young hoodlums, as though it is the entry to Dante’s Inferno, instead sloshing through the rain soaked grass on his daily trek to the hospital where he visits his dying wife. Harry, a Korean War vet, keeps his head down and goes on. Yet, somehow, these giggling villains are even more appalling than cold-blooded murderers. They are probably only tangentially aware of the young mother they mow down with their gunshots, their drug-addled consciousness buffering them from the reality of the deed. The film opens with a shaky camera recording some young thugs getting high and then taking off on their motorbikes. Harry Brown lives in the Council Flats – Britain’s bland euphemism for its housing projects – and watches helplessly the chaos around him. It is a savage world of casual brutality, where any semblance of conscience, remorse, or compassion has long been trampled underfoot. Our own local critic demands “Harry Brown – both the man and the movie – ought be kept off the streets.” These forbidden streets are in South London, where yobs – “boy” spelled backwards to indicate the antithesis of what one should be – rule. What does it say about a society that depends on a wheezy 80-year-old to clean up its streets? Michael Caine takes us where we’d rather not go in his portrayal of a reluctant vigilante trying to catch the bad guys as well as his ragged breath.Īnd in so doing he shows us a world many are determined to deny. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
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