Review of Harry Brown (2009) by Ario V — 28 Nov 2010

This was a Steven Seagal movie, starring Michael Cane. While trying to lead a simple and normal life, Mr. Brown, played by Cane, is dragged into a world of chaos and violence where he must call upon his extraordinary martial skills, forged in front-line military units, during a past life he tried to forget before the need for justice and righteous revenge came a knockin.

Sound familiar? After a long career of playing awkward, intellectual misfits, Cane decided to step into the role of an elderly British pensioner, forced to clean up the weltering gang violence engulfing his once peaceful neighborhood and avenge the death of his friend and chess partner, who died trying to do the same.

The scenes were predictable and completely over-the-top in their portrayal of mindless, drug-addled thugs without an ounce of humanity vs. Mr. Brown, the suave elderly man, who's cleverness, timing and skill at violence prove overwhelming to this group of cretins.

If you've already gotten the gist of the film at this point, I needn't mention the stiff, ultra-conservative white bureaucrats who get in the way and try to do things "by the book," not fully appreciating the situational need for a Mars Ultor to sweep down from heaven (or his small apartment as it were) and destroy the evildoers in his path.

POLITICS: The politics in the movie were ridiculous. Among the police and crime-control community in the UK, it is a well known and documented fact that drug dealing and gang violence are disproportionately the realm of non-whites, African and Asian immigrants in particular.

These groups are even more overrepresented in knife and gun violence. Yet in "Harry Brown,", there was nary a non-white to be seen among the dozens of gun-toting, knife wielding, drug dealing, raping, criminal gang members in the movie.

One police suspect in the early moments of the movie looked as though he might be part Arab. Otherwise, this movie gives the impression that whites have an absolute monopoly on every kind of criminal activity in the UK.

I tire of this anti-reality, shoved down our throats by film producers, who are unwilling to show the criminal underworld as it is. What point does this serve? What point is there in making every single bad guy white, in criminal enterprises where whites are often a minority? This is P.

C. nonsense being shoved down the throat of the viewer, as though a sociology 101 class needed to be weaved into the narrative. All in all, it was a junk film, with a junk plot, junk characters and a junk resolution.

You'll do well to avoid this one on your Netflix list.