Tagged: “Unmissable”
Source: Entire Ad Campaign
Location: Manchester AMC
Accompanied by: Andrew
Line re-action: While queuing I knew straight away who I wanted to serve me, and lucky me we got him; he just looked like a man who’d tell you straight, give you no bullshit. I ordered the tickets and then as I typed in my pin number I delivered the line with a little gusto. His re-action has already been dubbed (by Andrew) as the best one yet.
With a look of slight confusion and disbelief, he scoffed, “Unmissable?” Andrew and me started to laugh.
“Yeah, unmissable. Is it not?” I asked.
He replied, “It’s cheesy.”
“So you’ve seen it then and you wouldn’t say it’s unmissable?”
“No,” he handed me the tickets. “You’ll laugh,” and he wasn’t wrong…
Film Review: Many who know me will know that I have a very low opinion of British cinema. If it’s not a pompous rom-com it’s a glorified gangster film trying to be Hollywood. And if it’s not that then it’s either an attempted horror or a “gritty drama” set in a run down area that will no doubt feature drugs at some point. Harry Brown falls into the “gritty drama” basket (and yes, it features LOTS of drugs). To make things worse the main star of the film is Michael Caine, a man who I still cannot fathom why the hell people rate him so highly as an actor. He uses far too many unnecessary pauses when delivering lines and always delivers them as if he’s telling a story and not as though he’s having a conversation.
The storyline of this film is VERY simple and follows the step-by-step formula of a vigilante movie (one thing learnt is that if the film is a vigilante it’s got a bloody good chance of being unmissable). Michael Caine, (he plays Harry Brown, funnily enough) is an ex-marine, his wife’s dead and he has nothing better to do with his days than go to his local pub and play chess with his best friend, Lenny. When he’s not doing that he’s busy living in fear of the scallies who are selling heroin and just being a general nuisance on the neighbourhood by attacking people for no reason. A recurring scene in the film is of Harry walking to either the pub or the hospital (to see his wife before she dies) and stopping when he reaches the subway. He never dare go under the subway as this is dominated by the scallies who will no doubt beat the living daylights out of him, because that’s all they do to people who walk near them. So he always goes the long way round, even if he knows he’ll be late.
Anyways, Lenny tells Harry he’s scared, then that night Lenny gets stabbed to death and from this point onwards Harry takes the law into his own hands and decides to seek revenge on the scallies who killed Lenny. Remember, this pensioner is a former marine; so you can well imagine the carnage he’s gonna cause.
Now you may recall that when I reviewed Gran Turino I mentioned it could’ve been a lot like my personal favourite vigilante movie, Death Wish 3, but it wasn’t. However, Harry Brown is Britain’s answer to Death Wish 3, except it’s more brutal (despite having less deaths) and a hell of a lot more gritty. (To say this film is gritty is doing the film a dis-service and completely underselling it, and no, that’s NOT a compliment).
It’s a very, VERY slow starting film that has a totally unnecessary scene at the very beginning of some scallies performing some ritual to welcome a new member to the gang (he has to freebase and hold it in his mouth for as long as he can) and then shooting a lady in the park who’s walking her 2-year-old child. This is all filmed on a mobile phone to try and give you a hard hitting smack in the face introduction. It’s just a waste of time and already an obvious and easy method of creating “realism”.
Whoever wrote the script has really gone over the top on what scallies are like. Ok, so they are numpties. I won’t deny that, but to make them out to be pure evil that do nothing but thrive on brutal violence and talking like Ali G is a little unfair I feel. Even I’m not that stuck-up to dismiss them as complete morons, as intimidating as they may be. It’s just so stereotypical to have them behaving like this; it’s how the media portray them, like caricatures. No real research has gone into what the life of a scally is like (I’m well aware of how condescending I’m being labelling them as scallies, but yobs is a little light me thinks). If they did research scally life then I’d be very surprised, it can only have gone as far as picking up a red top.
There are many clichés in the film as well as far too many overblown moments. It seems the writer forgot that Harry Brown is a pensioner at times, because this guy can move around pretty sharp like. Marines or not, age catches up to us all and slows us down, but not Harry.
There’s one scene that seemed to go on forever and a day. Harry goes to buy a gun off two drug dealers, and these dealers are completely off their tits on every drug you can think of, to the point one of them looks permanently green. They live in this shitty little building, but in the back they have a lavish set-up where they’re growing a forests worth of weed (no shit) and there’s another room where there’s a lady who’s completely strung-out on heroin who the dealers rape and film and have the rapes playing on loop on some big LCD TV. This is what I mean by going way over the top and painting them out to be the worst of the worst and complete and utter scum. At one point the main drug-dealer freebases from a gun (that's not shocking, it's just pathetic!) It was from this scene where they lost any kind of realism that may have been up to now. But as I was saying, this scene is just far too long and ends ridiculously. Though it does feature Eli Dingle from Emmerdale!
Every scene in the film looks extremely gritty, just really fuckin’ grim, even the interview rooms at the police station look grimmer than a dungeon. At the police station there’s a sub-plot about the detective (played by Emily Mortimer) who knows Harry is the vigilante killing off these scallies, but the head of the police dismisses her (she’s a chick! Of course he’s gonna dismiss her.) As Andrew pointed out, this film is going back to the styles of exploitation movies back in the 70’s, and they use the same clichés and woeful twists. And just like in all vigilante movies the police are obviously incapable of anything and just don’t give a damn!
However, when I wasn’t laughing at the ridiculousness of the film, I did genuinely laugh once when Emily Mortimer’s police partner was talking about one of the scallies dad’s and said something along the lines of, “He’s a cunt, who’s son’s a cunt, who’ll end up having kids who’ll be cunts! Harry’s doing us a favour!” It wouldn’t be a gritty British film without “cunt” getting in there! But yes, this made me laugh because as horrible as it sounds, there is truth to that; cunts will raise their children to be cunts.
I won’t deny that there’s a definite “issue” with certain youths of today, but it is nowhere near as grim or as bad as they paint it to be in this film. Like this review maybe guilty of in places, this film is very patronising to youths and doesn’t even try to humanise them.
I was dreading this film to the point I was even a little grumpier than usual before heading out to see it. As I left the cinema I told Andrew it’s going to get the lowest rating of ‘abysmal’, but in hindsight and listening to Andrew, I feel that would be a little contradicting considering I enjoy Death Wish 3 (obviously for the wrong reasons) which is a bad film, but funny because of how bad it is. Harry Brown is a terrible, terrible film and far too brutal and grim, but, like Death Wish 3, the over the top nature and ridiculousness of it does make it funny.
Verdict: Missable
