Currently available on DVD: "Harry Brown"

Vigilante justice has long been a popular movie theme, but seldom has the central figure in such stories been of retirement age. Harry Brown (Michael Caine), a veteran of the Royal Marines who lives alone in a dangerous housing project in southeast London, would probably be just as happy not to play the hero. But circumstances dictate otherwise.

Brown prefers not to talk about his violent past and claims that he has become a different man than he was in his military days. But when local thugs murder his friend Leonard (David Bradley), Brown can't stop himself from seeking revenge. That puts him at odds with detective Alice Frampton (an intense and intriguing Emily Mortimer), who is investigating Leonard's death. Brown is bitter that the police are interested in a crime that, in his mind, they didn't do enough to prevent.

Disdainfully, he stalks the thugs on the streets. And as the body count mounts, Brown finds that he's in danger of losing the identity that he's worked so hard to build.

Harry Brown largely succeeds in transcending the clichés of the Death Wish genre, portraying the conflicted emotions of a man who takes little joy in the mayhem he perpetrates. Working from a screenplay by Gary Young, director Daniel Barber delivers a film that's as much a character study as it is a crime drama. At the heart of it is Caine's hauntingly memorable performance.

Despite his two supporting-actor Oscars — for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and The Cider House Rules (1999) — Caine remains somewhat underrated. It's unlikely that Harry Brown will do much to change that. But the film reasserts what his fans have known all along: that when it comes to combining vulnerability and menace, nobody does it quite like Caine.