HARRY BROWN (2009)

 Will they ever stop remaking DEATH WISH?  Probably not, but that's OK cuz I never get tired of the basic take-the-law-into-your-own-hands vigilante plot.  I'm a simple kind of guy.  While Charles Bronson was probably somewhere in his 50's when he starred in DEATH WISH Michael Caine here is in his 70's and looks around 800 years old, and the character of Harry suffers from emphysema, so that's kind of a new wrinkle I guess.  Luckily he's a former military man or this movie would be really short.  It's also all set in England so our villains here are closer to the "chav" stereotype than your typical American gangster.  The story itself plays out pretty much how you would expect without many surprises.  There is a strange sequence in a drug-lab/junkies house which was the high-point of oddness.  If this movie was made back in the 70's it would have been a lot more gritty and entertaining but since it's a new movie everything looks odd about it to me.  The look of the film(do we still call them films when they're shot digitally and no film is involved?) was the main deterrent to me.  It appears to have been shot with some kind of high-end digital camera which gives everything a flat glossy look which I guess appeals to the simple-minded type of devolved humans that still bother to see new movies in multiplexes.  I can see where maybe that works for one of those shaky-cam movies but this isn't supposed to be one of those.  Maybe when I turn 70 and my eyes start to go all fuzzy this type of cinema will look better to me.