It’s also illegal, dangerous and morally unsound, but that doesn’t stop Hollywood from featuring vigilantes in their stories.
Comic books have supplied the movies with vigilantes for years. According to comicbookmovie.com, “It is important to state one truth,” they write, “[and] that is, all comic book heroes, unless sanctioned by the government, are vigilantes.” That’s a wide group that includes, among others, Batman, Spiderman and Iron Man.
Lesser known is Rorschach, the anti-hero of the graphic novel The Watchmen and played by Jackie Earle Haley in the movie of the same name. He’s a masked crime fighter who believes in only good and evil. This black-and-white morality drives his ruthless need to punish evil-doers at all costs.
“Were it not for costumed vigilantism,” says the actor, “he’d have nothing.”
Rorschach is effective and lethal, but Paul Kersey didn’t wear a costume to earn his star on the Vigilante Walk of Fame. As played by Charles Bronson in five Death Wish movies, he cleaned up the streets with an efficiency that would make the Watchmen envious.
In the original 1974 film Kersey is an architect driven to taking the law into his own hands following the brutal murder of his wife. “If the police don’t defense us,” he says, “maybe we ought to do it ourselves.”
Star Bronson was quick to say that he didn’t “advocate anyone taking the law into their own hands,” but knew that the Death Wish movies were popular because, “Audiences like to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.”
Harry Brown is a gritty Gran Torino with British accents and a dash of Death Wish. Michael Caine plays the title character as High Noon’s Gary Cooper, but instead of being set on the wide open plain, the action in this Teabag Western takes place in the urban terrain of the Elephant and Castle section of London.
“This movie changed me,” Caine said. “I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless, just as much as the victims, and they had been neglected and they need help.”
Harry Brown is a common name, like John Smith or Greg Jones. It’s the kind of name that doesn’t draw attention to itself, but in the hands of Michael Caine, who plays the lead character in the revenge thriller “Harry Brown,” the name, the character and the movie become memorable.
“Harry Brown” is a gritty “Gran Torino” with British accents and a dash of “Death Wish.” Caine plays Brown as High Noon’s Gary Cooper, but instead of being set on the wide open plain, the action in this Teabag Western takes place in the urban terrain of the Elephant and Castle section of London.
Caine plays a widowed man who strikes back after a gang of feral yobs kill his best mate and confidant Len (David Bradley). D.I. Alice Frampton, (Emily Mortimer), a persistent but ineffectual detective with the thankless job of policing the council estate, suspects Harry is a part time vigilante but can’t prove it, and even if she could her partner is ambivalent to the pensioner’s gun slinging ways. “As far as I’m concerned, Harry Brown is doing us a favor,” says D.S. Terry Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles).
“Harry Brown” is a lurid picture of a crime ridden society. Its bleak worldview effectively illustrates the flip side of the Swingin’ London Caine came to personify in the 1960s. It’s a dark and menacing world where Len admits, “I’m scared all the time, Harry.” But all the atmosphere in the world wouldn’t be worth a hill of bangers and mash if you didn’t believe that an 80 year old man with an inhaler could effectively turn vigilante, take the law into his own hands and go all Dirty Harry on kids a fraction his age.
In a film ripe with nice performances—Mortimer is marvelous and Jack O’Connell is frightening as a young thug—Michael Caine shines, giving us a well rounded portrait of a man who is a trained killer—he was a marine—with a “certain set of skills” and as a defeated old man who has seen too much death and strife in his life.
He’s at his best when he plays the extremes—the heartbroken pensioner on one hand; the lethal killer who tosses off Tarantino-esque one liners like, “You failed to maintain your weapon, Son,” to a drug dealer whose gun jammed at the wrong moment, on the other—and it is his performance that humanizes the film’s often passionate pontificating on “Broken Britain.”
There was a time when Michael Caine appeared in every second movie at the cineplex. At least it seemed that way. In a career that spans 5 decades he’s appeared in 140 movies, 25 in the last nine years alone. They haven’t all been winners—remember Quicksand? Me neither—but what remains remarkable is that no matter the quality of the movie Caine is always the best thing in it. He makes movie acting look easy, which means, of course that he’s really good at it and while I haven’t completely forgiven him for Jaws: The Revenge or On Deadly Ground, I still look forward to seeing his easy charm on screen.
In the last year or so he’s slowed down his output—he is 76 years-old-after all—so while he isn’t exactly the omnipresent figure he once was, he still works more than most actors a third his age. His latest film, Is Anybody There?, probably won’t rank in Sir Michael’s career top ten, but as usual he hands in exemplary work playing a retired magician named the Amazing Clarence.
Written by Peter Harness, who based the script on his experiences growing up in a retirement home, Is Anybody There? is simultaneously the coming-of-age and old age story of Edward, a death-obsessed youngster (Son of Rambow’s Bill Miner) and Clarence, a prickly vaudevillian (Caine) who has grudgingly entered the old age home run by Edward’s parents. Set in a seaside English town in 1987 the movie charts the course of the friendship that develops between the two as Clarence gradually succumbs to dementia.
Is Anybody There? plays like a bleaker version of Secondhand Lions, the 2003 Michael Caine movie co-starring Haley Joel Osment in the role of the young boy. The main difference is that Is Anybody There? is a understated and micro-budgeted British film that treats the Clarence and Edward like real people and not just characters. Much of that wonderful realism is due to the cast, who are uniformly excellent, but Caine and young Bill Miner really shine.
Miner is the new Freddie Highmore, a child actor without an ounce of preciousness. In this film and Son of Rambow he hands in naturalistic performances that feel genuinely unmannered and real. Some actors take years of study to learn the technique that Miner seems to come by naturally.
Miner sparkles, but the reason to see the movie is Michael Caine. On the whole the film is a bit uneven, wobbling a bit as time goes on, but Caine’s understated and powerful performance elevates the entire movie. When he says, “You accumulate regrets and they stick to you like bruises,” his sad eyes—he may have the most expressive peepers in the movies—reveal an ocean of pain behind the faded blue of his pupils. Other times his light touch shines through. On reincarnation Clarence says he’d like to come back as a badger, “because they’re bad tempered and they look good.” It’s a wonderfully calibrated performance from an old master.
Is Anybody There? is a quietly film about growing up and growing old, that is by turns gently humorous, melancholy and most of all, heartfelt.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” The sorta-sequel to “Journey to the Center of the Earth” is a family action movie about people who treat the writings of Jules Verne as a Foder’s Guide to adventure.
Josh Hutcherson (soon to be seen in “The Hunger Games”) is Sean Anderson, a Jules Verne nerd who, with the help of his step-father (Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. The Rock) pieces together the location of the famed Mysterious Island using clues intercepted on a ham radio. Plane tickets in hand they head off to see if the place really exists. Along the way they meet a crazy helicopter pilot (Luis Guzmán) with a beautiful daughter (Vanessa Hudgens) several giant bees and tiny elephants and are reunited with Sean’s long lost grandfather, explorer Alexander Anderson (Michael Caine).
“Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” is a cross between “Gilligan’s Island” and a Saturday afternoon serial. From “Gilligan” it gets its silly sense of humor–“You know, if we die down there,” says Sean “Mom’s going to kill us.”–and from the serials it gets its sense of family friendly sci-fi fun.
Oscar winner and knight Sir Michael Caine rides on the back of a giant bee and The Rock cuddles a tiny elephant and Luis Guzmán tries to mine an active volcano made of gold.
It’s all harmless good fun. Not really memorable, but Caine is in crazy old coot mode, Guzman is gonzo and despite state-of-the-art special effects, the whole thing plays like an old fashioned kid’s adventure story.
Based on a Booker Prize winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders examines the way people express their grief when a close friend passes away. Jack (Michael Caine) dies, leaving behind his childhood friends (Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay), a wife (Helen Mirren) and reserved son (Ray Winstone). His friends and son take his ashes to Margate, a two-hour drive outside of London. Along the way, through flashbacks, we learn of the complex roles that these men have played in each other’s lives. Although it is a heartbreaking ride, there is nothing morose about this movie. The old friends argue and tell jokes, remembering Jack in their own unique ways. The common thread being that while they are sad he died, they are even happier that he had lived and graced their lives. The superior acting skills of Hoskins, Hemmings, Courtenay and Winstone rescue the film from director Fred Schepisi’s languid direction. Helen Mirren (who doesn’t accompany the guys on their ash-scattering mission) shines in her scenes with her hospitalized daughter. If only Schepisi had picked up the pace a little this could have been a real winner. As it is Last Orders is only marginally recommended.
Don’t call it a remake of the classic 1972 film based on Anthony Shaffer’s stage play which starred Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier as two men locked in a tricky and sometimes vicious game of verbal one-upmanship. No, the new Sleuth, penned by the Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter, has, for better and for worse, only a passing relationship with the original.
In the new film, directed by Kenneth Branagh, Caine graduates to the role of Andrew Wyke, the oddball crime novelist originally essayed by Olivier. Jude Law is Milo Tindle, an out of work actor and the paramour of Wyke’s estranged wife. When Milo visits Andrew at his eccentric country mansion to convince him to grant his wife a divorce the pair engage in a power struggle. Each man is pushed to his emotional limit, but who will come out on top?
The first thing you’ll notice about Sleuth is that it looks great. Branagh has set the entire movie in Wyke’s house, a strange and wonderful place that looks like a cross between The Jetson’s living room and a museum tableau of 21st century furniture design. Filled with stylish but uncomfortable looking chairs and filled with sharp edges, it perfectly captures the prickly, uneasy feel of the script.
Pinter has crafted a script that seems deceptively simple on its face, but reveals much for those willing to dig a little deeper. As the two actors parry back and forth even a line as innocuous as “Would you like a drink? I’m having vodka,” becomes laden with meaning. It would be a throw-away line in any other script, but here, as Wyke offers Milo a cocktail it reveals much about his character. He’s the perfect host, but also a controlling one. When he says “I’m having vodka,” it’s a passive aggressive way of suggesting that Milo also have a vodka. It also sets him up as a egomaniac. Who cares what he’s having? Certainly not Milo, but Wyke feels the need to announce everything in his life, even the most banal tidbits as if they were fascinating nuggets of wisdom.
Caine perfectly captures the rhythms of Pinter’s dialogue. He is to Pinter what Madonna is to the pointy bra. That is he was born to say those words. Law less so. The first hour of Sleuth crackles with snappy wordplay, humor and the two actors seem to relish every second of screen time, particularly Caine who fully embodies the Wyke’s English eccentric character.
Regrettably as the running time creeps up to the hour-and-a-half mark the story takes an unfortunate turn into psycho drama, and while Caine shines, Law’s work becomes over-the-top and even a bit screechy. His transformation in the movie’s final third didn’t work for me, and threatens to sink the entire film. Luckily Caine’s strong performance anchors the final moments of the movie.
Sleuth is a flawed, but interesting movie and worth the price of admission to see Michael Caine, one of film’s great actors, really strut his stuff.
In my review of the first installment of the revived Caped Crusader franchise I wrote, “I went in to Batman Begins expecting a lot and left wanting less—less psychological babble, a lesser running time and less of Liam Neeson’s ridiculously wispy goatee.” For the new episode, The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan has kept most of the stuff that bugged me about the first movie (except for the wispy goatee part, which is, thankfully, is no where to be seen) but has, this time around, created a tour-de-force that left me running for my thesaurus to find new words for awesome.
Its two-and-a-half running time makes it the longest of the summer blockbusters but, unlike Get Smart or Sex and the City, there isn’t a wasted second or extraneous scene. The film takes off like a turbo charged Batmobile, opening with an exciting bank heist, and doesn’t let up until the end credits.
Following the robbery, in which $68 million dollars of the mob’s money is stolen, the triumvirate of Batman (Christian Bale), Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldham) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) take a broom to the streets of Gotham in an effort to, once and for all, put an end to crime in their city. After mass arrests the crime fighting trio comes up against their greatest foe yet, The Joker (Heath Ledger), a psychopath with a sinister scar in place of a smile, who forces Batman and Dent to push the boundaries of their professional crime fighting ethics.
Since 9/11 the world has spent a great deal of time pondering good and evil, and so does The Dark Knight. It is the first true, post 9/11 superhero movie; one that looks at the use of chaos as a tool of terrorism while exploring the paper thin line between good and evil.
Dispensing with the jocularity of Iron Man, the CGI action of The Incredible Hulk and Hancock’s sense of irony, The Dark Knight is a serious film with a positively Shakespearean exploration of the ethics of good and evil that raises timely questions in these unsettled times. Mainly, to what lengths can heroes go as they fight crime before they stop being heroes and become vigilantes? When is it OK to break the rules to stop evil? Batman and Dent grapple with these questions (more than, say, Rumsfeld or Bush ever did) as the Joker pushes them closer to the edge of their moral boundaries.
The Joker’s biggest question is one for the ages. Can bad guys exist without the good guys?
“I don’t want to kill you,” the Joker tells Batman, by way of an answer. “You complete me.”
But don’t get the idea that The Dark Knight is only a treatise on the nature of villainy. It is that, but the ideas about good and evil are wrapped around a popcorn movie that is packed with great action, thrills and good performances.
Christian Bale fills out the Batsuit better this time around, skillfully portraying the moral tug of war the character plays with his conscience while ably pulling off Batman’s outrageous feats of physical prowess. Bale may be the only contemporary actor who can convincingly pull off ennui one second and then pilot a supercharged motorcycle up the side of a building the next.
New franchise addition Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in for Katie Holmes, brings a feistiness to the character of Bruce Wayne’s oldest friend and soul mate Rachel Dawes. Aaron Eckhart in a dual role does a nice job of playing the transformation from the virtuous DA Dent to the twisted morality of the considerably creepier Harvey-Two Face. Old pros Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, as Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler and equipment designer respectively, round out the cast, both handing in effortless performances.
Of course the cast member everyone wants to see is Heath Ledger as the Joker in his last completed performance. I always felt Batman Begins was marred by the lack of a great villain, but this time around the inclusion of Ledger’s Joker guarantees on-screen fireworks for The Dark Knight.
Whereas Jack Nicholson’s Joker was a pop culture icon for the prosperous 80s and 90s, Ledger’s Joker is a super villain for the new millennium; a terrorist, more interested in creating chaos than in anything else.
He’s a disfigured bad man—“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stranger,” he says—who when he isn’t killing people—his preferred weapon is a knife because it’s up-close-and personal—keeps busy creating elaborate schemes to test the moral fiber of the men who want to put him behind bars. Ledger strips the character of Nicholson’s cartoon persona, re-imagining him as a fiendish lunatic. From the slash of red lipstick where his mouth should be to the caked white make-up that obscures his face Ledger’s Joker is an unhinged creation that will likely inspire nightmares. It’s a bravura performance that sees the late actor working at the top of his game as he creates the definitive version of the character (sorry to any Cesar Romero fans who may disagree).
The Dark Knight is a rare beast. It’s a summer blockbuster with equal parts brain and brawn.
The director of Michael Caine’s latest film, the crime drama Harry Brown, says Caine is the only person in England who everybody loves.
“He is a great Briton,” says Daniel Barber, “and he is admired in Britain by everyone, high, low or whatever as being one of the great Britons. He comes from very humble origins; he is truly a man of the people like very few people are.”
In reaction, Caine laughs, “I dunno. They say, ‘You’re an icon now.’ I say, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ There’s no lessons. There’s no special icon bar where you go, meet up and learn what to do. I just consider myself lucky.”
The humble routine is part of what makes Caine beloved, but his Harry Brown co-star, Emily Mortimer, adds, “People feel both in awe of him because he is an icon but he is, at the same time, somehow accessible. That’s an amazing combination. To be a big movie star but for people to feel that they know you and that you are a good bloke and you’d be a good person to have a pint with.”
Harry Brown takes Caine back to his roots. The film, about a widowed man who strikes back at the hoodlums who have terrorizing his community, was shot in his old stomping grounds.
“It’s amazing because we were working on the same estate that he grew up on,” continues Mortimer. “A lot has changed since then, but that was incredible for him; an inspiration for him. There’s a big wall in the Elephant and Castle with a big painting of him as his character from Get Carter on it. There were moments when the 76-year-old Michael Caine would walk past this wall in the projects, in the middle of real degradation with this iconic image behind him. Moments like that were fantastic.”
“I always said I come from the slums,” says Caine of the E&C neighborhood where he was born, “and I do, but when I went back I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Because when we were shooting late at night, I’d talk to the neighbourhood boys and I realized I was quite lucky because I had two thing they didn’t have: I had a happy family life and I got an education. So I had two valuable things they didn’t have, and one thing they did have that I didn’t. That was drugs.”
Caine blames drugs for the rise in hoodlum culture that Harry Brown portrays. “In the end,” he says, “they wipe out all feeling for the other person.”
But despite strong feelings on the subject, Caine believes making Harry Brown taught him something.
“This movie changed me,” he said “in as much as I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless, just as much as the victims, and they had been neglected and they need help.”
In the TIFF film Harry Brown, Michael Caine plays a widowed man who strikes back at the hoodlums who have terrorizing his community. It’s close to a British take on Gran Torino, but don’t suggest to Sir Michael that it’s Death Wish U.K.
“It’s not like that at all,” he said. “It’s a complete work on its own. It was made by a young director named Daniel Barber. The first film of his I saw was The Tonto Woman, which got an Academy Award nomination for best short film. I liked it. It was a western and this is kind of like a western. It’s Gary Cooper in High Noon.”
So you could call it a Teabag Western if you like, but instead of being set on the wide open plain, the action in Harry Brown takes place in the decidedly more urban terrain of the Elephant and Castle section of London, an area Caine knows well.
“I always said I come from the slums,” he said of the E&C neighbourhood where he was born, “and I do, but when I went back I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Because when we were shooting late at night, I’d talk to the neighbourhood boys, … I realized was I was quite lucky because I had two thing they didn’t have: I had a happy family life and I got an education. So I had two valuable things they didn’t have, and one thing they did have that I didn’t. That was drugs.”
Caine blames drugs for the rise in hoodlum culture that Harry Brown portrays. “In the end,” he says, “they wipe out all feeling for the other person.”
But despite strong feelings on the subject, Caine believes making Harry Brown taught him something.
“This movie changed me,” he said “in as much as I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless just as much as the victims and they had been neglected and they need help.”
It’s been a long time since Caine lived in Elephant and Castle. After six decades of making films, he’s a film icon, which, true to his humble roots, is a title he has trouble accepting.
“There’s not a special icon bar where you go, meet up and learn what to do,” he says. “I just consider myself lucky.”
In this weekend’s movie Prisoners a father, played by Hugh Jackman, kidnaps the man he thinks abducted his daughter and her young best friend. It’s a classic case of vigilante justice, a practice another movie character, Foxy Brown, called “as American as apple pie.”