Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Suspense/ Drama/ Mainstream
Director: Neil Jordan
Year: 2007
Rating: 
WORTH A LOOK
At bottom, The Brave One is a compromised studio product. With Jodi Foster involved, you’d think that The Brave One would be a legitimate examination of the themes of loss, urban violence and revenge, the same way that Clean was an examination of a drug (and life style) addict rejoining the mainstream of society. Fat chance. The Brave One wants to have it’s cake and eat it, too. So, we have long discussions of the morality of revenge and so forth, but Neil Jordan makes sure that no one gets shot the same way twice — there’s a good smattering of grindhouse gore to appeal to the Trash Cinema crowd.
Now, mind you, I actually don’t mind high minded movies that double as Trash Cinema, but The Brave One is dishonest about it. It grandly announces it’s high-minded intentions with a soliloquy at the beginning of the movie, but then we get all sorts of on the nose, movie-of-the-week dialog. The cinematography is of the usual glossy, Hollywood type. No real grit here. The events in the film are completely unbelievable, undermining any attempt at seriousness. Everyone Jodi wastes is a complete and utter scumbag, so the film hamhandedly dodges any real moral ambiguity.
So, you can’t just relax and enjoy a nasty, grungy revenge thriller but neither is your intellect engaged by an honest examination of the themes brought up by the story.
Oh, yeah, the story.
Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) and her fiancee are brutally mugged in Central Park. After she wakes up from her coma, freaked out Erica gets a gun and through a jerry-rigged set of circumstances, is soon shooting holes in Goyesque scumbags. Meanwhile, she strikes up an absurd friendship with Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), who is investigating the vigilante killings.
When you get right down to it, The Brave One is just a psuedo-intellectual gloss on the grandaddy of the genre, Death Wish. There’s a certain amount of enjoyment in watching Jodi Foster wax a bunch of reprobates, and I’m grateful that director Neil Jordan makes the killings nasty and fairly graphic, but the script by Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor is such a steaming pile of horseshit that The Brave One is about as irritating as it is entertaining.
If you’re the sort of person who demands consistency, coherence, and logic in movies, you should probably avoid this movie. If you’re a big fan of revenge movies, and very forgiving of pretension and studio derived, focus group driven screenplays, you might get some enjoyment out The Brave One.
Your move.