Roland Emmerich is showing us this week how the world is going to end in 2012. Watch Harry Brown and you'll start thinking that it can't happen soon enough.
It's difficult to think of many films grimmer or less touched by any uplifting features than Daniel Barber's tale of a decent lonely OAP who turns vigilante after his best mate is murdered on a dismal London housing estate.
Michael Caine is on cra
cking form as the eponymous Harry, a former Royal Marine inhabiting a ghastly world dominated by knife-wielding hoodies and unhinged druggies – a world in which ordinary people live in fear.
Harry's life is limited to chess games in the pub with his mate Leonard (David Bradley) after his wife follows their daughter to an early grave.
But then Leonard is savagely murdered with his own bayonet – and it's soon obvious that the police are powerless to do anything about it.
That's when Harry decides to act, single-handedly cleaning up the neighbourhood, digging out his old service knife and penetrating the awful drug dens. Soon armed with a gun, the nice old codger becomes a killing machine.
Which is when Barber's bleak film becomes distinctly distasteful. Are we supposed to rejoice as Brown variously guns down, burns and stabs the low-lifes? Is this really decency's only resort?
Emily Mortimer meanwhile turns in a strange performance as the world's worst police officer, an implausibly-drippy and ineffectual detective inspector utterly out of her depth.
Everything about this film is ugly, the settings, the crimes, the responses and their consequences. It all adds up to a couple of hours of remarkably depressing viewing, with not a single genuine or convincing flash of hope to redeem it.
And yet, as a movie it works strikingly well, drawing you in powerfully as Caine delivers a towering performance – humanity's last, murderous stand against the horrid sub-human world which is threatening to swallow up everyone.
Phil Hewitt's rating: ***
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