Entertainment

Senior moment of truth

The great Michael Caine kicks some serious butt as the title character in “Harry Brown,” a geriatric Dirty Harry who’s fed up with the drug-dealing punks who have turned his East London housing project into a sewer.

After an opening that depicts a senseless murder of an innocent mother, we meet Harry, a mild-mannered senior citizen who’s just buried his wife.

He’s put his past as a Marine in Northern Ireland long behind him.

At least he thinks so, until his only friend (David Bradley) is brutally murdered by punks after the pal unwisely brandishes a sword to frighten them off.

When Harry looks into the attack and ends up killing a thug in self-defense, he reluctantly discovers a renewed interest in taking up arms. In the movie’s best sequence, a disgusted Harry goes to buy weapons at a warehouse filled with drugs — and teaches a couple of creeps indulging in the merchandise a lesson they’ll never forget.

Caine, 77, gives a wonderfully nuanced performance as the conflicted and sometimes frail Harry, although the script denies him the redemptive arc that Clint Eastwood got in the superior “Gran Torino.”

“Harry Brown” is much closer in tone to “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish,” with a lone vigilante striking out when the ineffectual authorities fail to maintain societal order.

A clever police detective (Emily Mortimer) fingers Harry as a suspect in the mounting body count.

But even her cynical partner (Charlie Creed-Miles) laughs at the idea of a pensioner with emphysema being an avenging angel. And the concept is an embarrassment to their bosses. The film climaxes with a full-scale riot that traps the detectives and Harry in a bar that turns out to be anything but a safe haven.

First-time director Daniel Barber, who has effectively cast unknowns as the young thugs, presents a dark, scary vision of present-day London reminiscent of New York in the 1970s. Unlike “Dirty Harry,” this film doesn’t particularly have an overt political ax to grind.

But it thankfully strips away the veneer of glamour that Guy Ritchie and his imitators have applied to British crime films over the last decade or so.