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 that's straight out of the Daily Mail – a place where your granny might get shot, stabbed or battered at every turn".

Harry Brown, opening on November 13, is the latest British terror-thriller to play on older audience's fear of the stereotypical youth of 'broken Britain', following films such as vampire horror Eden Lake, The Disappeared, in which a young boy disappears on estate terrorised by hoodies, and Philip Ridley's forthcoming Heartless - a supernatural thriller in which the teenage hoodies turn out to be genuine demons.

But the threat of hoodies are very real, Barber insisted in a recent interview with the Guardian. "I'm scared of these kids in gangs," he said. "They have no respect for any other part of society. It's all about me, me, me. Life is becoming cheaper and cheaper in this country."

Harry Brown sees Caine return to the south London streets where the 76-year-old spent his teens in the 1940s  - just a few years before teddy boys became cinema's first teenage menace. "I come from the slums, I come from a hard background, I come from a poor family, and I was a soldier," Caine recently told the Daily Telegraph.

Caine’s solution to the gang problem is the same as Harry Brown's – today's youth should go into the army.  "My character says to one villain, 'You should have done some service and you wouldn't have become an animal'," he told the Telegraph. "I don't want to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, but I do think there should be some sort of national service for young men."

WHAT THEY ARE SAYINGMark Dinning, Empire: "Most obviously, it's the UK's answer to Gran Torino, with its disgruntled OAP putting the smackdown on the smackheads polluting the turf he's called home for years. It also borders, alarmingly at points, on a fascist's fantasy, Caine's Harry shooting, barb-wiring and torturing his hoodie prey without much in the way of remorse and with much in the way of graphic close-up." (Verdict: four stars out of five)

Kevin Maher, the Times: "A feature debut for the advertisement director Daniel Barber, it is a stylish shadow-soaked testament to Caine's own increasingly monumental screen presence." (Verdict: three stars out of five)

Kirk Honeycutt, the Hollywood Reporter: "It all comes down to Michael Caine, who makes the whole thing workable though not believable. Despite his efforts, the Western format fits awkwardly into an urban hell."

Joe Leydon, Variety: "Pic should skew toward older auds, though many younger ticket-buyers may be curious to see ass-kicking by the actor they know best as Batman's butler." ·