Geriatric Crime Fighting

Vigilante movies.  Love them or hate them, they seem to perennially popular as far as film makers go - and filmgoers, for that matter.  It's important to remember that they don't all look like the Death Wish films, with enraged suburbanites blowing away young people left, right and centre.  Any film in which the protagonist takes the law into their own hands is a vigilante move.  Many Westerns fall into this category, not to mention all those movies about 'rogue cops' and the like.  That said, a recent vigilante movie I watched turned out to be a throwback to the Death Wish days.  Indeed, it seemed to take its inspiration from those later films in the Death Wish series, the ones even Michael Winner wouldn't direct, where Charles Bronson was of pensionable age and you expected him to keel over with a heart attack at any moment as the excitement of gunning down punks got too much for him.  In Harry Brown, Michael Caine's eponymous geriatric vigilante actually does collapse from an emphysema attack whilst pursuing a juvenile delinquent following a gun fight.  Whilst undoubtedly well made, Harry Brown presented me, as a viewer, with a number of problems.  Not least, the fact that I used to work with someone called Harry Brown, who wasn't (as far as I know) a vigilante, but who did become infamous at work for being caught at the urinals having a pee whilst drinking a mug of coffee.  Presumably he was measuring his throughput.  Anyway, thanks to this coincidence, I kept fearing the worst every time we had a scene in the estate pub's toilets involving the filmic Harry Brown.  Thankfully, he didn't take his pint with him to the urinals.

But, getting to the point, the film also presented with all the problems of characterisation and narrative that inevitably trouble me whilst watching vigilante movies.  Central to these are that, in order to maintain audience empathy with the vigilante, all of the characters he (or she) kills have to be so irredeemably evil that they become grossly exaggerated stereotypes and, consequently, completely unbelievable as characters.  In Harry Brown, for instance, in order to justify an old codger gunning down teenaged drug dealers, the gang plaguing the estate he lives on are portrayed as a bunch of total scumbags with no apparent motivation for their behaviour beyond the fact that they are simply unpleasant thugs.  In reality, of course, there are all manner of reasons linked to social and economic deprivation, let alone family backgrounds and peer pressures which lead young people into crime.  But exploring such factors would have risked generating some audience sympathy for the ostensible villains of the piece and highlighting the fact that film's hero was actually a murderer.  The film is even confused as to Harry Brown's justification for his killing spree.  Whilst he is supposedly motivated by the murder of his pensioner mate, Len, the mobile phone footage he obtains from one of the gang, (after administering a bloody good pistol whipping), shows that Len had pretty much provoked the incident that led to his demise by going after the gang with a bayonet.  A good defence lawyer could probably have argued that they acted in self defence. 

But hey, the whole point of vigilante movies is that they aren't subtle - they appeal to our basest, most reactionary instincts.  The people on the receiving end always deserve it and are obviously guilty, even though the police can't make a case against them.  Still, who needs evidence when they are obviously guilty?  I mean, ugly, ill-educated and unpleasant poor people can never be innocent, can they?  Perhaps my expectations are too high.  Maybe Harry Brown was meant as a satirical statement on government social policy, with Michael Caine tiring of the government's approach to youth unemployment he endorsed during the last election campaign, and instead giving the little bastards what they deserve - hot lead.  The 'Big Society' in action with regard to law and order.  I eagerly await sequels - doubtless in Harry Brown 2 our wheezing hero will take on those bloody immigrants who come over here and take our council flats, hospital beds and child prostitution rings.  In the next one he could start blowing away those nonces the police protect, before, in the fourth instalment, taking on those bastard police, judges and politicians who protect the scumbags by refusing to jail them without 'evidence'.