Harry Brown belongs to the ever-popular genre of revenge movies, in which one man finally snaps and turns vigilante on the thugs who have destroyed his life. In this case, Michael Caine does a fine job portraying a retired British pensioner and war veteran living in cheap high-rises overrun by violent young delinquents. "Delinquents" is too soft a word, because these villains are more horrifying than usual--but at the same time, it feels appropriate because so much stress is laid in the movie on the generational gaps separating Caine (and his terrified chess partner) from the teenage nihilists who control his neighborhood. When Caine finally decides to strike back, his initial vulnerability and hesitance are overcome by the utter atrocity of the drug lords and hoppers around him.
This atrocity is, more than anything, what sets Harry Brown apart from the various related genre pieces that it samples liberally. Plotwise, this is more or less a British Gran Torino without any comedy or redemption; some of the drug lords look a lot like the infected from 28 Days Later (which helps heighten their brutal inhumanity); and the sense of an anonymous evil force is emphasized by scenes of invisible high-rise residents showering goods on the police that come straight out of The Wire.
If all these echoes make Harry Brown sound less original than it might have been, the movie still comes together into an entertaining and disturbing whole that adds something to the genre. Caine's performance is offset by Emily Mortimer's kindly but rule-bound detective, whose almost maternal pity for Brown struggles against her dawning awareness of his vigilantism--an emotional complication that provides a suspenseful counterpoint to the one-man shoot-'em-up storyline.
Furthermore, part of what makes it interesting is what it shares with a movie like Gran Torino. Both movies go out of their way to stage the revenge plot as a conflict between a now feeble, grandfatherly man and a pack of dangerously undisciplined youth. They seem to be defining a specific sub-genre of revenge flick, one troubled by the idea that old-fashioned father figures are disappearing only to be replaced by bureaucrats and kind souls inadequate to the task at hand. Unable to come to any easy solution, they bring back Father for one last high-caliber and riveting metaphorical spanking.
