Old friends are killed by small gangsters, 70-year-old veterans are possessed by the gods, and one by one they hunt down and kill murderers to take revenge

Harry Brown tells the story of retired officer Harry Brown who uproots the gangsters and avenges his best friend Leonard.

Harry Brown (Michael Caine), a retired Royal Navy officer in his 70s, lives on a pension after his wife's death in a small apartment near the slum. The nearby pedestrian tunnel is a place for street fights, drug trades and physical buffs among the gangsters, and the old man Leonard (David Bradley), a good friend of Brown's chess players, is often harassed by the gang and even brutally killed. Female police officer Franpton (Emily Mortimer) and her subordinates investigate the case, but due to insufficient evidence, they have to release Leonard's killer. The elderly Brown couldn't bear it anymore and decided to personally fight to eliminate the and avenge Leonard.

Some movies are simple, and they are not afraid of simplicity. For a story without suspense to be compelling, it must successfully mobilize people's simplest but most sensitive emotions. James Cameron has done this very successfully - whether it is "Titanic" or "Terminator", it is a plot that can be clearly explained in one sentence, but it is addictive and repeatedly hit. Today came Harry Brown again.

Of course, Harry Brown has nothing to do with Cameron's films, it keeps reminding me of Kill the Wolf. First, they explore the same topic: the contradiction between legal process and extrajudicial vigilantes. In "Kill the Wolf", the police have not been able to grasp the criminal evidence of the gangster, so that in the end, only through illegal violent means can the sinner be "brought to justice". Harry Brown, played by Michael Kane, is in a desperate emotional situation after his friend is killed, and at the same time resents the incompetence of legal means and begins to lynch. This is a typical conflict between a legal society and a moral society. Western political power is based on a set of laws, so legal procedures are not only a way of doing things, but also the embodiment of the system itself. What it achieves is a process of "just" solidification of nihilistic concepts. Therefore, it must have a rigid side: because the accuracy of the procedure represents the rigor and impartiality of the law, the destruction and negligence of the procedure is equivalent to the destruction of the integrity of the entire system.

At the same time, because of its transparency, the system also has the inevitability of being countered: without evidence, the police cannot prosecute the murderer, and the murderer knows how to escape. Thus, morality plays the role of "complement" at this time. This is why there is a rogue like Robin Hood: his image represents a certain social expectation of legal powerlessness, which is based on mainstream values. It is emotional and completely ignores procedure and logic. Therefore, its implementation often only needs to be "the will of the people" to be established. What Harry Brown did was undoubtedly illegal, but emotionally he was on the side of the audience. Therefore, Harry Brown can not be regarded as law enforcement, nor can it be regarded as justice in the legal sense, but it is the "justice" that everyone expects. Countering violence with violence is the best way to satisfy the victim (the psychology of the audience in the theater), which is why ancient criminal law was often full of bloody and violent execution methods, and liked to show the public execution: these "performances" that reproduced the evil deeds committed by prisoners against the victims were the climax of the trial and the "comfort" of the victims. But at the same time, the law has changed from guaranteeing justice through procedures to maintaining social stability by "entertaining" victims. So this image of moral perfection is, on the one hand, both the expectation of the lower victims and the easiness to exploit by the rulers. A typical example is Bao Qingtian.