Though
Michael Caine is his usual watchable self as the title character in Harry
Brown, a 2009 revenge drama about a 77-year-old pensioner who lives in
a London housing estate overrun by teenage brutes, what you might take away
from the film is its abject filth. The
drug dealing villains of the piece appear to have been dipped in feces prior to
their scenes, and though the message wants to be that drugs have turned our
cities into shooting galleries, the deeper theme appears to be that good people
are clean-cut and presentable, while the baddies are ugly and covered in scum.
When his best friend is killed trying to defend himself from some of the locals
thugs, Harry swings into action, visiting an underground drug den to buy some
weaponry, sort of like good ol’ Travis Bickle meeting with his gun dealer in Taxi Driver. Harry encounters a pair of
scary misfits who have plied their trade in the shadows for so long that
they’ve turned into Golem-like creatures with nearly undecipherable cockney
accents, a neat trick since nearly everyone in the movie sounds like they’re
talking with their mouths full of mashed potatoes. It’s in this fetid criminal
lair that Harry finds, to his glee, that the killing instinct honed during his
time as a marine in Northern Ireland is still sound, and that he still has the
poise to stand over a bleeding victim and mock him for not keeping his gun
clean.
And
people don’t just die in Harry Brown.
They wallow in their own gore for a while, emitting strange, bubbling sounds,
their final words usually being a four-letter curse word favored among the
ignorant everywhere. And give the Brits credit – they can curse better than
anybody, including Italian-Americans, African-Americans, and Southern rednecks.
True, Americans put plenty of steam into their vulgarities, but the Brits make
it all sound so damned musical, even when it emits from the lowest depths of
poverty and anguish. But not even the joys of hearing British profanities can
lift this movie above its station, for at heart it’s merely another
gun-wielding melodrama where a respectable citizen is mad as hell and can’t
take it anymore, and viewers will find themselves quietly cheering, like
Pavlovian dogs conditioned to wet themselves over violence, when the old geezer
puts those young hoods in their place.
The
movie received some nice press when it first came out in 2010, with many
critics comparing it to Clint Eastwood’s Gran
Torino. “We are all so desperately weary of CGI that replaces
drama,” wrote Roger Ebert. “With movies like this, humans creep back into crime
stories.” Manohla Dargis at The NY Times was less enthused, but claimed that
Caine matched Charles Bronson’s old vigilante roles “move for move in the
annals of big, bad, bloody, disreputable entertainment.” For the most part, reviews were positive
because Caine is the true definition of a movie star, and can even perk up an
arthouse potboiler like Harry Brown.
That he played Harry as a wheezing old man, suffering from emphysema and
occasionally collapsing in the middle of a shootout, gave the rather exploitative and sensationalistic material its touch of reality. It wasn't the snarling villains who made the film seem earthy, it was Caine alone in his apartment, buttering his toast.
“This strata of society exists in my country,” Caine said
upon the release of Harry Brown, describing the movie as “a wakeup call.” Caine
also tried to sell the film as one that didn’t celebrate violence, which is a
bit like saying Clockwork Orange
doesn’t celebrate rape. From the opening scene of Harry Brown, where a mother
is randomly killed in front of her child, we’re hit with a sort of full-frontal
viciousness, and while it’s not the
computer game mayhem of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, it’s every bit as
numbing. And the fact that a female investigator played by Emily Mortimer
suspects Harry has killed several drug dealers but doesn’t blow his cover tells
us all we need to know about the movie’s politics.
First time director Daniel Barber likes to splash around
in the muck of depravity, and with help from cinematographer Martin Ruhe
(shooting in Dolby Digital), he makes Harry Brown’s section of London - most of the film was shot in Walworth - look
bleak and grey, like an old metal railing that has been rained on for decades.
There’s a stiff, cell-like feel to most of the scenes, as if the characters are
all living in shoeboxes and have never seen daylight. The climactic battle
between the neighborhood punks and the police feels aptly apocalyptic, with
homemade petrol bombs flying through the air, while sick old Harry tries to
outlast the madness drizzling down all around him.
All ends well for Harry, but he’s such a fragile bloke that I almost wished he had someone like Zoe
Bell in his corner to provide some backup. Bell’s first claim to fame was that
she served as Uma Thurman’s stunt double in the Kill Bill movies, as well as Lucy Lawless’ double in television’s Xena: Warrior Princess. She has since
tried to carve her own niche as an action star. The same year Harry Brown was made, she appeared as
the assassin Eve in Paul Etheredge’s Angel of Death. The movie isn’t much more than a
Tarantino-flavored knock off with lots of fighting and shooting, and buckets of
unimaginative dialog by screenwriter Ed Brubaker. With a background writing
comics for DC and Marvel, Brubaker’s idea of how characters talk goes something
like this: “Fuck you.” “No, fuck you!” and so on. If the Brits of Harry Brown make cursing into a vile
symphony, the cast of Angel of Death
sound like summer stock actors from Bridgeport doing a futile imitation of Goodfellas. But Bell makes the movie
palatable. Like Caine, she has a movie star quality. I just wish she could find
better projects.
Angel of
Death was originally a 10-part episodic series on Crackle,
where it’s playing now in its entirety. Bell plays an assassin who works for a
crime family. After being stabbed in the skull during a fight, she suffers some
after-effects, such as falling to the ground and frothing at the mouth, and
worst of all, she’s grown shy about killing, haunted by visions of past
victims. That’s bad news for someone in her business. The comic book storyline
is silly and adolescent, just an excuse to string together a dozen or so scenes
where Bell shows off her fighting skills. What makes Bell compelling is that
she never plays Eve as a superwoman, and takes as many punches as she gives
out.
Bell has the kind of lazy sexiness that reminds me of
vintage Ellen Barkin, but since she’s one of the few actresses who looks
comfortable fighting, she’s stuck in these rough and tumble parts. Of course,
Bell looks convincing in everything she does – she even dials a phone with
nothing less than absolute authority – while the rest of the Angel of Death cast can’t even fake
smoking a cigarette. Steve McQueen biographers have often noted that one of the
keys to McQueen’s success was his ability to look comfortable at anything from
handling a rifle to jumping a motorcycle. Zoe Bell has this same kind of
comfort level and authority. For instance, she looks undeniably confident when
handling a pistol, whereas most actresses hold guns as if they’re fresh off the
firearms safety course.
The problem is that Bell's action roles are one dimensional.
I’ve seen her in other films and in interviews where she shows cleverness and
humor. The director who can meld Bell’s funny side with her ability to choke a
guy will have a winner.
Both films are now playing on Crackle...
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