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Tony Earnshaw: Gun-toting vigilantes aren't right role models for children
I'm a sucker for that peculiar brand of movie that features an old-timer dusting off his guns and giving some heat to the pesky folk who are making his life a misery.
Of course, there are different variations of this age-old tale of vengeance. Sometimes it's a dad going after the bad guys who wronged his family (Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence; Liam Neeson in Taken). Or a grizzled war veteran galvanised into action by a senseless act of violence (Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino).
Then there's the plain story of revenge in which someone with a past history in the military gets all gung-ho when a close pal is given rough treatment by local thugs. The latter scenario forms the basis for Harry Brown, in which 76-year-old Sir Michael Caine takes the fight to the gangbangers who haunt the council estate where he lives in London.
Caine has described the mood of the film thus: "It's as if Jack Carter got old and they picked on the wrong guy."
Caine is of course referring to the gangster he played in Get Carter, a trademark slice of Caine meanness in which a sociopathic killer heads north to avenge his recently murdered brother. The one connecting factor in all these films is that someone reluctantly takes up arms. In the case of Kevin Bacon it was a comfortable middle-class American dad. The others are all based around men with military backgrounds.
I'm reminded of the flurry of movies that came out in the '80s, all of which seemed to star either Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Most of them appeared to focus on a laconic anti-hero with a gun collection to rival the armoury of a sizeable US army base who went off to avenge himself on random villains of the wild-eyed and often cackling variety. Sometimes they were cops. More often than not they were some ex-Special Forces operative, now retired and contemplating the quiet life. Then someone made them angry.
One would assume that films have evolved a little since those reactionary days. Don't believe a word of it. In fact, filmmakers are now using the collective fear of a nervous population (in the US as well as the UK) to propagate a myth: that there still exist macho men for whom the final solution remains the gun.
Michael Caine obviously believes that. I haven't yet seen his film – it opens in the UK in November – but I am hoping that it deals intelligently with the growing problem of public disorder and the rise of gang culture in Britain. Eastwood's offering focused on alienation and the ageing process. Gran Torino was careful to show how violence and the corruption of youth were inextricably linked. Taken was about patriarchal responsibility taken to extremes. Death Sentence, on the other hand, was a journey into psychological disintegration via mass murder.
Harry Brown will doubtless tap into a nerve and whip up a cacophony of calls for something to be done about what is increasingly seen as the lost youth of 21st century Britain. Caine thinks so. But while I enjoy these movies I do fear promoting the image of a gun-toting vigilante
is not a message we should be presenting to our children.
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