Michael Caine is a force to be reckoned with in Harry Brown, but then, when isn’t he? He’s in a class of older actors who shine whether playing minor roles, like Alfred in The Dark Knight or here, playing the lone gunman Harry Brown. At the outset of the film, he is a quiet, fearful man. He holds back when faced with confronting the local punks who haunt an underpass outside his dreary apartment complex, chooses instead to visit his dying wife (Liz Daniels), and play chess in a local bar with his longtime companion, Leonard Attwell (David Bradley). But his wife dies, and those local punks murder his pal, leaving Harry Brown with nothing to loose. The local authorities, lead by the impotent D.I. Alice Framptom (Emily Mortimer), do nothing as the outlaws rule Brown’s apartment complex; and, slowly, quietly, a different Harry Brown awakes. Not the mild-mannered friend and husband, but the younger, wilder, violent Green Beret Harry Brown. And, like a Clint Eastwood cowboy, he hunts down the wild troublemakers, guns-a-blazin’.

The film combines the gritty realism of British suburbia – drug dealers with warehouses of marijuana growing, the corrupt police force, graffiti and unprotected elderly – with the dynamics of a classic western, complete with a final, all-out showdown between the law and the bandits. But, what really shines about Harry Brown is Harry Brown himself, and Michael Caine’s nuanced rendering of him. Shots often linger on his face in close up, uninterrupted, carried completely by minute gestures, pauses, and the energy boiling behind his tired eyes.

There are a few elements that seem out of place, however. With such a gritty, realistic tone established, the use of CGI smoke and blood spurts seems even more artificial than it might otherwise. The violence Harry Brown inflicts on the youth seem excessive – he gladly straps a young man we’ve seen sexually abused by his uncle to a chair, the boy begging for mercy, and Harry Brown not showing any human emotion toward him as he savagely beats him. Brown just seems crazy here, eerily calm like a serial killer, and hardly less unfeeling than the youth he is revenging himself upon. After this scene, Brown goes back to killing for motivated reasons, killing the guilty, sparing the innocent.

Nevertheless, Harry Brown travels at a blissful pace, with the talent of Michael Caine amping the tension even in the quieter moments of the story. Harry Brown might easily be compared to Clint Eastwood’s recent Gran Torino, in which Eastwood plays a cranky widower who must protect his Latino neighbor from the threats of a local street gang, but Harry Brown is grittier, less sentimental, and features a stronger lead performance. Somber, violent, and sober, Harry Brown is Britain’s answer to the Western – and it’s a fully loaded one.