OK -Since Charles Bronson, there has been a MULTITUDE of 'doll-grey- nobody' grows into 'morrodung-avenger-kickass'. The opposition has been EVERYTHING.. I mean it.. Spiders Martians Mafias Voodoo Hindoo...(well maybe no that doo, but i weakly remember one with evil hairdoo's.. Oh well This one has Micheal Caine! Enough said! Genius reliable believable and just plain -Good! The script is mainstream: * Baddies do bad stuff * Goodies are hurt * Caine kicks ass That would pretty much be a recipe for a B% strait-to-video flick, but it is NOT. All participants are acting brilliantly, and the plot has the needed twists, to make it sufficiently different from the recipe. Its a great vigilante movie! 7+ from me.

I remember watching films like Dirty Harry and Death Wish in the 1970s and thinking that America must be a seriously messed up place to produce violence like this. England at the time was still a fairly genteel place, although crime was massively on the rise. Sadly, some 40 years on, I wish I could say that this film is a ludicrous over the top version of Modern Britain, but, from my own experience, I don't think it is.Therefore, politically, I think the film is bang on. However, aesthetically it is rather lacking.Only one sequence stands out as a striking cinematic vision. This is when Harry Brown visits a couple of coked up gun dealers. He enters a subterranean world, a little bit of hell on earth and part of the power of this sequence is that the dealers are too drugged up to realise the level of degradation about them. This section is extremely well shot and acted by all concerned.The other parts of this fail to approach this level. Much of the film looks like it could have been made for TV. True, the scenes of the 'youths' being interrogated are energetic and realistically written with four letter words in every sentence, but generally the police scenes are rather dull and empty. The caring female PC and her officious male superior are too cliché ridden (and politically correct) to be effective. The writing of these characters just seems to be going through the motions.The final bloody shoot-out again fails to convict, while the conclusion just has a dangling unfinished feel.

When an actor has had a career that spans six decades and includes hundreds of films, it's hard to choose a defining role. Even if you can choose just one performance, it's usual from way back when they were in their prime, but at seventy-six years old, Michael Caine proves that some things are just better with age. Caine is portraying Harry Brown, an lonely old man, who has recently lost his wife. All Brown has left is his best friend and a tiny apartment, but that changes when a group of thugs start reeking havoc on the neighborhood and slaughter his best friend. After that, something in Brown just snaps, and he turns to skills he learned in the army a lifetime ago. This isn't a film about some over the hill action star in the CIA, there is no weird twist, or strange background associated with Harry Brown. He is just a real person, dealing with a situation that people have to face every day in lower income neighborhoods. The gangs have taken over and no one is safe, especially the elderly, and that is very apparent in this film. Harry Brown is an action thriller, but it is also one of the realist movies I have ever seen. Every thing from the gangs activity to the way Harry goes about is life is as real as it gets, and it is truly frighting. Michael Caine stars and he doesn't have the moves, temperament, or even style of your typical action hero, yet somehow he's better than all of them combined. For Caine it's never been about brawn, it's about brains, and that's what he uses against a gang that's a third of his age. Critics raved about this film, while I avoided it, because I honestly couldn't see Michael Caine cleaning up his neighborhood and taking out thugs at his age. I was wrong, because Harry Brown is one of the best performances of his career. This film is just so realistic and clever, I never would have expected it to be the amazing experience that it was. This film really got to me and it includes one of the best performances I've ever seen. Harry Brown is a true gem of independent cinema, it is free of any Hollywood bull, and it is the reason people still go to the movies. Please take my advice and don't miss this one.

This is the known story of a man become into vigilante . An elderly ex-serviceman and widower , Harry Brown , (Michael Caine) looks to avenge his best friend (David Bradley)'s murder by doling out his own form of justice . As a retired man turned vigilante and taking the law into his own hands as judge , jury and executioner. As every man has a breaking point . Harry turns the one-man vigilante when his friend is attacked , beaten and then stabbed to death in an underground passage carried out by furious band formed by some ominous punks . Then he stalks the slums of London and takes the law into his own hands, searching vengeance on crooks, hoodlums, druggies , muggers, pimps , making the neighborhood safer and bumping off delinquents and street scum . Meanwhile , police officers D.I. Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) and D.S. Terry Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles) are investigating the deeds and Police Superintendent Childs (Iain Glen) orders a major arrest operation believing the recent violence is related to a gang war. The late-night raids on the neighbourhood result in a massive riot .This interesting picture has suspense , emotion , intrigue , thrills and lots of violence . It's certainly thrilling , though the morality may be questionable , even in this time, as the spectators were clearly on the Harry Brown's side . Michael Caine with his usual top-notch acting displays efficiently his weapon such as ¨Harry the Dirty¨ and killing mercilessly nasties . Michael Caine saw a lot of himself in the character of Harry Brown, e.g. they're both combat veterans , as Harry is a Marine who served in Northern Ireland, Caine served in the British Army during the Korean war , and Caine lived in the same area that Brown does , it was things like these that drew him to the film . Secondary cast is frankly excellent such as Emily Mortimer , Charlie Creed-Miles , David Bradley , Iain Glen , Sean Harris, Ben Drew and special mention to Liam Cunningham as Sid Rourke . This is Daniel Barber's nice feature debut , he's now shooting ¨The keeping room¨ with Hailee Steinfeld , Sam Worthington and Brit Marling .This exciting and above average film belong to ¨Vigilante genre¨ whose main representations are ¨Charles Bronson's Death Wish¨ , successful crime thriller that created the Vigilante genre with Bronson as the main star such as ¨Death wish II¨ ¨Death wish III¨ , ¨Death Wish 4 : The crackdown¨and ¨Death Wish: The face of death¨ and , of course , ¨Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry¨ movies , such as ¨The enforcers¨, ¨Sudden impact¨ and ¨The dead pool¨ . Furthermore , other notorious movies on the ¨Revenger¨ genre that achieved their splendor in the eighties are the followings : ¨Exterminator¨ I and II with Robert Ginty ; ¨Vigilante¨ by William Lusting with Robert Foster , Fred Williamson ; ¨Walking the edge¨ by Norbert Meisel with Robert Foster and Nancy Kwan ; ¨Dark Angel¨ with Betty Russell ; ¨Steele Justice¨ with Martin Kove ¨; ¨The Punisher¨ with Dolph Lundgren , ¨Joe Don Baker's Walking tall¨ saga ; ¨Lorenzo Lamas's Snake eater¨ saga , ¨Arnold's Raw Deal¨ , ¨Stallone's Cobra¨ and many others .