Movie Review: "Harry Brown"

5. Great actors can elevate mediocre material so Michael Caine's lead role in "Harry Brown" gives the unoriginal movie a sense of gravitas the script does not actually offer.

4. Decorated veteran Harry Brown is a retiree who lives in a hellish London apartment complex overrun by drug-dealing thugs and juvenile delinquents to make "Boys In The Hood" and "Menace 2 Society" proud.

3. In the tradition of "Death Wish," Brown is pushed to the edge -- his wife dies of old age and his best friend is murdered by a gang of street toughs who hang out in a pedestrian subway near their apartments.

2. What follows is what you'd expect -- Caine's Harry Brown takes the law into his own hands and seeks a reckoning with his friend's killers.

1. Caine is, of course, excellent and is as believable pumping bullets into creepy drug dealers as he is giving warm soliloquies about falling in with his wife, but the film offers few notable surprises and is generally unsatisfying.

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"Harry Brown"
Run time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Rated R‎‎
Genre: Suspense-Thriller‎
Director: Daniel Barber
Cast: Emily Mortimer, Michael Caine, Iain Glen, Liam Cunningham and Jack O'Connel
Finney's Flicks Grade: C+