Harry Brown - A Sign Of Future Tory Justice Policy

Ok, so we’ve had Gran Torino – iconic actor/director Clint Eastwood playing a grumpy (but tough as nails) old geezer who endeavours to sort out the local gang of thugs and help his friend.

And now, set in good old Blighty (TM the blitz spirit) we have Harry Brown – Iconic actor Michael Caine (Tory supporter and mini-driving geezer) playing a rather quiet and lovely old bloke who after his wife dies refuses to help his old pal defend himself against a gang of drug-dealing scum, then when the friend is brutally murdered by aforementioned scum he has something of an epiphany and decides that enough is enough…

Here the two films differ a fair bit in the way each director approaches the way in which violence and vigilantism are and should be portrayed, in the Eastwood film it is almost as if the great man is apologising for the plethora of action films he had made up to Gran Torino and it is also like he is saying that violence only breeds more violence. Caine’s (and Director Daniel Barber’s) film is more of a full-on assault on British society in the early 21^st century with Caine as an unapologetic spectre of doom, dishing out death and ‘justice’ in equal measure to the dregs of society without once ever trying to show how such people and situations are created and give possible solutions to the poverty and machismo attitude of certain inner-city youth and working class people in general.

Don’t get me wrong – the film is very entertaining and definitely worth a watch but does nothing for Caines career and after him ‘coming out’ as a verdant Tory supporter (no real surprise there!) this film as social commentary is very deeply flawed.

Mark Duncan