Harry Brown
Year: 2010
Directors: Sebastian Gutierrez
Stars: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, David Bradley
MPAA Rating: R
Studio: Marv Films
Running Time: 103 minutes

The theme of revenge is always one that resonates well with movie goers. It’s a bit of fantasy for all of us who have been wronged and who have dreamed of getting revenge in the worst way. Films like Oldboy, Kill Bill, and Taken have done well in recent years, but the theme is not a new one. Death Wish, The Last House On The Left, and Mad Max spoke to audiences in the previous generation. Bridging the gap between the two generations are films like Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino and the new revenge film, Michael Caine’s Harry Brown.

The beginning of every good revenge story should show how our jaded hero (or heroine) has been wronged. Harry Brown is a lonely man who lives alone in The Estate, an apartment community overrun by a vicious gang of drug dealers. He has just lost his wife and soon after, his only friend in the world, Leonard (David Bradley, “Argus Filch” in the Harry Potter films) is brutally murdered by the gang. To make matters worse, Harry learns of the death of his friend when two police officers come to his house to question him about the whereabouts of his friend the day of his death.

While his wife was alive, Harry had made a promise to himself not to discuss any of the horrific things he had witnessed and done while serving as a Marine, but now that she has passed away, Harry uses those skills to get back at the thugs who are destroying the community around him.

As with most revenge movies, the thrill of watching the movie doesn’t come from brilliant writing or unexpected plot twists. Harry Brown is rather by the book in this regard. The thrill comes instead from the satisfaction of vigilante justice. It’s something hard-wired in all of us to want to see the bad guys get what we feel they deserve, especially when the police force can’t prosecute due to lack of evidence.

Harry Brown is definitely a “hard R”, with plenty of bloody violence and foul language. Several scenes will make you cringe, especially a scene of violence against an unsuspecting mother. But still, just like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino and Liam Neeson in Taken, there’s just something satisfying about watching an older man take action into his own hands. Vigilante justice is something that can only be done onscreen, escapism at its finest.

Review Rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars

“Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot!”
-- Harry Callahan from Magnum Force

“We all got it coming, kid.”
-- William Munny from Unforgiven

“Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have messed with? That's me.”
-- Walt Kowalski from Gran Torino

Clint Eastwood is a cinematic atlas of Post-World War II America. He is an icon. No one would argue with this premise. He is a towering presence in front of and behind the camera. I used to think he was the closest thing we have to John Huston, but I was wrong. Eastwood is his own man. He has proven himself time and time again. He embraces the world of filmmaking and bends it to his will. He paid attention to the great directors he worked with in the early years of his career: Sergio Leone, Don Siegel and Ted Post. I remember in the late Seventies when Play Misty For Me, High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales were shown on television, I would watch them with my Mom. These films are as fresh now as when they were first released. Each film that followed, good and bad, showed an enormous dedication and respect for the craft of filmmaking. If there is a John Houston comparison, than it is that they both improved as they aged. Who could argue the quality of John Houston’s late films-- Under The Volcano and Prizzi’s Honor? He left us with an enormous body of work which still excites us. In White Hunter Black Heart, Eastwood portrays a very thinly veiled John Huston like director. I think it is safe to say that Eastwood admired and learned from John Huston. Clint Eastwood shows no signs of slowing down. Whenever he hits a bump in the road like Blood Work, he comes back with films like Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. I know that there are many who feel Million Dollar Baby is an over rated film. I am sure Annette Benning hates it as much as Boys Don’t Cry. Did it deserve to win the Oscar for Best Picture? I do not know; there were a lot of great films to pick from in 2004. What I do know is that it was Eastwood’s Frankie Dunn that was the highlight of the film for me. Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman were good, but there is nothing quite like watching Clint Eastwood in front of the camera.

Gran Torino is a pleasure to watch. No other living actor could portray the bigoted, Korean War veteran, Walt Kowalski in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. We would not accept anyone else but Clint Eastwood playing the character. I really do not even think that Jack Nicholson or Tommy Lee Jones could portray this character as authentically as Eastwood has done. It is Eastwood’s rich career of characters that has led us to Walt Kowalski. He has a little bit of Harry Callahan, Josey Wales, Thomas Highway, William Munny, Frank Corvin and Frankie Dunn mixed with Archie Bunker. In another time, we might have seen John Wayne or William Holden play this part. Speaking of John Wayne, Gran Torino is reminiscent of Don Siegel’s The Shootist where John Wayne played a dying gunfighter who wants to die with dignity. What made the film so emotionally powerful was that Wayne was dying of cancer in real life. It was his final performance. Is Gran Torino Clint Eastwood’s version of The Shootist? Eastwood has stated that this would be his final screen performance, but by no means the last film he will direct. Yet, he gives an incredible and moving performance similar to John Wayne’s J.B. Books. In all my years, I would have never compared John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, but there are times when the two have collided. Is not Heartbreak Bridge just a far superior version of The Green Berets? Both films are shamelessly jingoistic. Still they are products of different times. I doubt John Wayne would have had anything to do with a World War II film as cynical as Flags Of Our Fathers or would have appreciated Letters From Iwo Jima. I am sure he wanted nothing to do with Kelly’s Heroes. John Wayne’s view of the Western was far different from Clint Eastwood’s. I always preferred Eastwood, but there is no denying the influence and power of the great John Ford Westerns in which John Wayne starred. Gran Torino is a great character study in the same way as Mickey Rourke’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. In both films, the two legendary actors are tailor made for their roles. We cannot imagine any other actors playing Walt Kowalski and Randy “The Ram” Robinson. To be honest with you, I would never want to.

They do not make films like Gran Torino anymore. Mr. Eastwood has made a film that is very much about America and what the ideal of America is or was. Walt Kowalski is a dying breed. He is in many ways like the aging gunfighter who knows his time is coming to a close. He represents an America that is close to extinction. When we meet Walt, he is widower whose only pride and joy is in his flawlessly maintained 1972 Gran Torino fastback. It is fitting that his car, like him, is a rare piece of American Steel from the Ford assembly line. We learn that he used to work on the Ford assembly line. He worked during the industry’s heyday. He installed the steering column on his car. The film takes on added poignancy because we are witnessing the end of the great American automobile industry era. It is very fitting that the film takes places in Detroit-- a city whose industry must be saved as I write this. Walt’s whole life is an endangered species. The career he once had is going to be as obsolete as he is. Walt is retired; he sits on his porch with his faithful yellow Labrador, Daisy, and drinks beer while offering colorful commentary on the world around him. Foreigners keep moving in. Walt is a bitter man who cannot understand all the changes going on around him. Walt drinks as much beer in this film as Walther Matthau’s Morris Buttermaker did in The Bad News Bears. He is walking, talking advertisement for political incorrectness. The character seems outdated and tired at the dawn of the Presidency of Barack Obama. He has nothing kind to say about anyone. He is as bitter as they come. He snarls and growls at every chance. If Walt was played by another actor, the film would have come across as caricature. Having said that, Eastwood could have fallen into self-parody many times in the film, but does not. If he had done this film twenty or thirty years ago, it would have come across as self-parody. I think his character, Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge does fall into self-parody and that was back in 1986. He has enough bile to make Archie Bunker feel at home, but he hates everyone in the same way as Dirty Harry. While he deplores the sight of the Hmong refugee family that lives next door to him, he detests with even more vigor the young neighborhood priest, Father Janovich, played by Christopher Carley. Janovich wants him to come to confession because Walt’s late wife wanted Walt to go to confession, but Walt has no interest to confessing to a priest who just got out of the seminary.

If the film was just Eastwood shouting out racial slurs, it would not have quite impact it does have. What gives the film its true impact is Walt’s relationship with the Hmong immigrant family. One night, Thao (Bee Vang), the teenage son who lives next door, breaks into Walt’s garage and attempts to steal the prized Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. He fails miserably and nearly loses his life to the car’s angry owner. Thao’s family, led by his sister, Sue (Ahney Her) forces Thao to work for Walt. They set up an arrangement where Thao will do household chores for Walt. Walt is not thrilled with the idea, but reluctantly goes along with it. He seems like the most unlikely surrogate father for Thao. Walt’s relationship with his adult children is strained at best. After his wife’s funeral that opens the film, his children want him to live in a retirement community. Walt becomes an unlikely mentor to Thao and even to Sue. One night, Hmong gangbangers threaten the family. Walt comes out with his rifle. Walt means business and he has no time for this nonsense. He threatens the gang and they leave. He becomes a hero to the immigrant community; they leave gifts on his doorsteps. In another scene, he rescues Sue and a male friend from a trio of gangbangers in a bad section of town. He becomes their protector. It is a transformation that no one expects, especially Walt. His scenes with Thao reminded some of the relationship between Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita in The Karate Kid, but it really reminds me of the relationship between John Wayne and Ron Howard in The Shootist and the relationship between Alan Ladd and Brandon De Wilde in Shane. Walt’s relationship with the family will lead to increasing and more violent encounters with the gang. His relationship with the family of Hmong immigrants leads to a transformation in his own personality. They are as wary of outsiders as he is. They have their prejudices that mirror his bigoted self in some ways. Although none of them have the acid tongue he does.

In many ways, Gran Torino is a modern western, a 21st Century answer not only to the Dirty Harry films, but also to The Man With No Name trilogy of westerns he made with Sergio Leone. Mr. Eastwood is very aware of the characters he has played over the last fifty years. Walt Kowalski is the latest of his outlaws to roam on the screen. This is where Gran Torino greatly differs from The Shootist. The Shootist was about the end of lives and the ways of doing things as was Shane and to a greater degree The Wild Bunch. It really is William Holden’s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch who is the perfect symbol of a man who has outlived his times. I see more of Pike Bishop in Walt Kowalski, but also in Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country For Old Men. In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood has remodeled the hero and his image at the dawn of the 21st Century. He has given us a Dirty Harry for our times, for the Barack Obama era. Walt Kowalski is an older, if not wiser Harry Callahan. In his own way, Walt changes throughout the film. In the end, he has to do the right thing. In the end, he is the very embodiment of change.

So, this is supposedly Clint Eastwood’s swan song as an actor. Of course, he said the same thing after his Oscar winning film “Million Dollar Baby,” so this might just be a publicity stunt designed to get the film a bigger audience. Wasn’t this the same guy who said after winning the Best Director Oscar for “Million Dollar Baby” that he was “just a kid?” Age certainly hasn’t taken Eastwood’s ability as a director, and it adds to his work as an actor. This is certainly the case with his first starring role in several years in “Gran Torino.” As disgruntled Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski, he gives a great performance that has a bit of Dirty Harry, a bit of Will Muny from “Unforgiven,” some of Frankie Dunn from “Million Dollar Baby,” and that burning glare that is still stuck in my memory from when I first saw “City Heat.” That one was practically the only Clint Eastwood that I could see as a kid, and it had a lot of bad language for a PG rated movie.

Anyway, “Gran Torino” starts with Walt at his wife’s funeral, and with him staring disdainfully at his grandkids who are not even trying to take any of this seriously. His teenage granddaughter is more interested in texting her friends than listening to the priest giving his sermon. Of course, this may have to with the fact that Walt Kowalski is not the most likable of people to put it mildly. At the reception after the funeral, he proves to be cold and distant from just about everyone close to him, and he’s quite dismissive to his grown kids who want to help him. Everyone’s helping him, and he treats it like it’s an insult.

Soon after, he inadvertently becomes involved in the affairs of the Hmong family living next door when an Asian gang tries to kidnap the youngest son named Thao in an attempt to initiate him into their gang. When a fight breaks out and it spreads to his lawn, Walt comes out with his rifle and puts an end to the altercation quickly. Knowing Walt, he just wants peace and quiet, but the Hmong family sees him as a hero and start praising him with gifts of food and flowers which drives him nuts, but from there he builds a kinship with the family which brings the best and some of the worst out of him.

At its core, “Gran Torino” is a familiar story in that it deals with a man in contact with people he does not fully understand but comes to love by the movie’s end. But it brings out the brilliance of Clint Eastwood the director in that his handling of the material makes it anything but familiar. Many of his best movies have a very down to earth feeling that brings you closer to the story and the characters involved in it, and he doesn’t rely on casting picture perfect actors who would unintentionally suck away all the reality inherent in the screenplay. Eastwood gives us a close knit Asian family that is anything but you average type of family, and he gets deep into their culture and of the traditions they keep. It’s a great family that breaks through whatever stereotypes we have of them, and seeing Walt hang around them gives the movie some of its best moments.

However, the fact that the family lets Walt hang out with them is astonishing when you take into account the vile crap that comes out of his mouth. As an actor, Eastwood never tries to hide from the ugly racist that Walt is, and the name calling he does makes it seem insane that any of the Hmong family would keep him around for 5 minutes. Watching “Gran Torino,” I tried to think of another actor other than Eastwood who could play such an unpolitically character as this and still make you sympathize with him and follow him wherever he goes. There may be a few actors that are possibilities, but none comes to mind as quickly. Eastwood gives the character of Walt Kowalski both a toughness and vulnerability that is tougher to achieve than you would think. To say that this is a part that Clint could just walk through would be an insult to what he manages to accomplish here. In my book, his role in this movie is more than worthy of an Oscar nomination.

In the youth obsessed town of Hollywood, it’s nice to see an actor of Eastwood’s age show how it is really done. A part like his in “Gran Torino” cannot be played by some Clearasil clean face that adorns many of the shows on the CW network, but by one whose face and body is etched with the marks of a life that has experienced so much of everything like war, love, and heartache. One of my favorite scenes has Clint driving up to a trio of black guys who are messing with Sue, a member of the Hmong family next door, and her white boyfriend. Clint comes in and breaks up the party, going out of his way to insult just about everyone around him. He calls the white boy there a pussy and busts his chops for trying to pretend that he’s black (that got one of the biggest laughs in the theater the night I saw it). Clint then delivers a line that would sound ridiculous coming out of any other actor’s mouth:

“Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have messed with? That's me.”

Watching that, I felt more than convinced that only Clint can sell a line like that. I like to believe I could, but a lot of people who know me seem to have a huge misunderstanding of the kind of guy I am.

The more I think of Clint’s role in “Gran Torino,” the more multi dimensional it appears to be, and Eastwood nails every part of it perfectly. We see the pain in his face of memories from long past that haunt him to this very day, of the despair he experiences the pain of the Hmong family in their worst moments, and we can clearly see the regret in his face that he was not closer to his children throughout their lives. Even though Walt Kowalski can seem like a hateful son of a bitch, Eastwood gives him a strong humanity that illustrates the kind of person he is.

By casting unknown actors as the members of the Hmong family, Eastwood the director gives the movie an even stronger authenticity of feeling to where you feel like you have known these people for a long time. One of my favorite performances in the movie was by Ahney Her who plays Sue Lor, the teenage daughter of the next door family. She is a real kick to watch throughout the film as comes through Walt’s casual insults unphased and even convincingly manages to get Walt to come over to the family barbecue. It takes her a bit, but she manages to draw him in when she mentions that there is beer. Ahney gives us a jaded teenager with a good sense of humor who is no pushover. She’s the kind of girl we knew from high school regardless of race, and Ahney Her steals every scene she has in the movie.

Another terrific performance in the movie comes from Bee Vang who plays Thao Vang Lor, the young boy of the family who (in a matter of speaking) befriends Walt. In the movie, the local Asian gang makes him try to steal Walt’s prized Ford Gran Torino which he keeps polishing every day, making it look brand spanking new. This of course pisses off Walt to no end, but Thao’s family makes him work for Walt to pay off his debt. Walt doesn’t hesitate in calling Thao, but later finds ways to toughen him up and getting him to stand up for himself in rather unusual ways.

As dark as the movie seems, the movie has a quirky sense of humor to it that makes the movie all the more enjoyable. Another great moment in the movie has Walt teaching Thao how to talk like a man to get what he wants. The scene in the local barbershop of Walt getting Thao to talk like a man is a hilarious moment in how unpolitically correct he gets Thao to talk, and he playfully messes with Thao’s head to get him to realize a few things. This leads to one of the movie’s gut busting moments when Walt helps Thao get a construction job and lets Thao do the talking. I almost passed out because I was laughing so hard.

The last half of the movie turns bleak as the Hmong family deals with devastating events that threaten not only them, but Walt as well. It almost seems like the movie will have a “Death Wish” kind of ending, but Eastwood is much too smart to let the movie descend into a world of manipulation, endless preaching, and sentimentality. You think you know where the movie is heading, and while you may be right, the terrific screenplay by Dave Johannson & Nick Schenk keeps you on the edge of your seat and has you guessing what will happen all the way to the end. It’s very clear that this is a redemption piece, but the way that Walt achieves his redemption in a way that is not what you expect and quite shocking at the same time.

The title of the movie refers of course to Walt’s prized possession, his 1972 Ford Gran Torino. The car itself seems to represent a rite of passage for both Walt and Thao, and how they feel about the car informs the evolution of their character throughout the film. Walt’s granddaughter is the first one to discover the car and asks Walt if she can have the car when he dies. Now if that doesn’t show you the kind of character she has, nothing will. The car is not simply an object to be shown off, but a piece of history that is deserving of respect. This shows as we see Thao gain more respect for himself and more confidence in what he does. It’s the kind of car that your dad will say that you need to earn the right to drive. Basically, that means you will be lucky to drive it all in your lifetime.

“Gran Torino” is the kind of movie that I think really brings out the best in Clint Eastwood both as an actor and as a director. I am convinced that had this script landed in the hands of another director, it would have ended up being your average anti-racism parable with loads of clichéd characters and predictable situations. But with Clint in the director’s chair, he gives the movie a genuine humanity, and he lets the characters propel the plot of the movie instead of the other way around. He gives the movie a strong sense of reality that draws you into the story right away, and gives it a freshness that almost makes you forget that we have seen this kind of movie before. I really enjoyed “Gran Torino” a lot more than I thought I would. I figured it would be a decent movie at best, but Eastwood the director seems to be releasing a new movie every other week, and he continues to challenge himself and his audience with each project he does. I also have to say that I’m really glad that I didn’t have to sit through another ending like the one in “Million Dollar Baby.” I don’t think I could handle that again.

If this is to really be Clint Eastwood’s last movie as an actor, he gives himself a great tribute to all the tough guys he has played throughout his career. It also shows that he was out to challenge himself as an actor here as he managed to make an unsympathetic character sympathetic. Is it the best role of his career? Maybe not, but it is certainly one of the best of his long career, and one that shows that he is a greater actor than many people give him credit for. Hopefully, an Oscar nomination will be bestowed on his performance here, and not just because he says it’s his last one. Only time can tell about that.

And if the Academy does fail to nominate Eastwood, they better make sure to stay off his lawn!

**** out of ****