Parents' Guide to Harry Brown

Billed by some as a spiritual sequel to the classic 1970s crime drama Get Carter, this British vigilante thriller also casts Caine as a ruthless hard man, albeit one in advancing years. Pitted against a violent local gang on the declining housing estate he lives on, Harry Brown falls back on his military training to administer rough justice to a collection of drug dealers, rapists, and pimps. What the movie lacks in nuance it compensates for partly in explosive set pieces. It helps that, while the villains are largely cartoonish, they're played by a raft of then-emerging British cinematic talent. Ben Drew—also known as rapper and musician Plan B—puts in the most memorable performance of his acting career, while Jack O'Connell brings some humanity to abuse survivor Marky, even if he doesn't find much sympathy in the script. Elsewhere, Sean Harris and Joe Gilgun commit to their pairing as psychotic, drug-addled arms dealers in the movie's most hellish and borderline surreal sequence. The faults lie in a muddled finale that tries to tie together too many loose ends and find some meaning in the madness we've watched unfold. Perhaps predictably, the movie's moral center, Emily Mortimer's D.I. Frampton, is the most underwritten character of this wild bunch.