Michael Caine goes back to London’s mean streets

The new British film Harry Brown, which stars Michael Caine as an elderly widower who seeks revenge after a local gang brutally murders his friend, has divided the critics over its portrayal of inner-city life.

Caine plays the eponymous Harry Brown who lives on a bleak London housing estate which is over-run by drug dealers and hoodies. For the first half of the movie, Harry, a former Royal Marine, lives quietly - eating toast, and drinking beer and playing chess with his best friend Leonard. But then Leonard is knifed to death by local teens in an underpass.

Harry realises he cannot depend on the mostly impotent police force after the gang's leader (played by UK rapper Plan B) walks free. So he decides to take the law into his own hands.

Writing in the London Evening Standard, former Spectator editor Matthew D'Ancona says the film has "genuine social and political content [which] deserves to be treated as a commentary on contemporary mores as well as a regular cinematic experience".

The portrayal of the "hellish world of teenage crime that is both shockingly violent and morally unsparing" is not there simply to entertain but to serve as "a terrible warning", D'Ancona continues. "It is the nerve-shattering means by which the film portrays a society that is utterly disfigured, in which generations turn against one another, and a veteran soldier is so crazed with thwarted grief that he is ready to point his service revolver at teenagers."

Other reviewers, however, despair at first-time director Daniel Barber's reactionary take on 'urban youth'. Barber’s depiction of the hoodie gangs "continually undercuts" the film, says Kevin Maher in the Times, and is "frenzied and hysterical. They rob, kill, smoke crack, rape, film themselves raping and shoot mothers in front of babies. It dramatically justifies Harry's revenge, but it transforms the film into exploitation fodder, which surely was not the intention."

Time Out's Daniel Barber calls Harry Brown a "hateful vigilante flick" and a "warped portrait of our city