Brave One, The

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Jodie Foster looks old and busted in "The Brave One," a vigilante film from Director Neil Jordan. A little too thin and with dark circles around her eyes, the typically lovely Foster makes for a believable victim of a horrendously violent crime. She looks simply horrible through "The Brave One" and I can buy into her being a terribly frightened woman who struggles to survive after watching her fiancé beaten to death and recovering from a three week coma, herself. That aspect of "The Brave One" is nicely done, and Foster does a fairly decent job of conveying a level of badassedness throughout the film that is amplified with her continual smoking of cigarettes and tough-looking jackets. Foster is a fine actress and she did manage to earn a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in "The Brave One," but once you get past Foster´s performance, the film begins to quickly unravel.

"The Brave One" is Neil Jordan´s attempt to reinvigorate the vigilante genre and tap into the audience that made the "Death Wish" series of films a profitable venture for its star, Charles Bronson. With Jodie Foster beginning to show signs of aging at the forty-five years old, her bankability as a leading lady now requires roles that use her great acting talent and do not rely on her looks. She has never been a glamorous leading lady and has played a few very tough characters, so casting her in "The Brave One" makes perfect sense and nicely works with today´s continual push for female empowerment movies. The film certainly pushes the concept of revenge and ultimately allows for the heroine to get the vengeance she thirsts for. However, even with Foster´s talent and a few nice scenes that bring back fond memories of the older genre films, "The Brave One" is fatally flawed.

The problem with "The Brave One" lies in its storytelling and execution. Not executions of characters, mind you, but the taking the concept of a leading lady going on a rampage and putting it to celluloid. The film begins with a rather violent attack on the character of Erica Bane (Jodie Foster) and her fiancé David (Naveen Andrews) going for a walk with their pet German Shepherd. When their dog runs off to chase a ball and doesn´t return, they go and find the animal, but discover that it is being held by a trio of thugs who have decided they want a sizable reward to return the animal. When David and Erica refuse to meet their demands and one of the men begins to get frisky with Erica, David tries to fight the men, but this only results in an extremely violent assault with leaves David dead and Erica is thrown into a coma. Although this seems a little heavy handed, the film starts on the right foot with the attack.

For a woman who makes her living walking the streets of New York City and then talking about them on the radio, her awakening finds her deathly afraid of the Big Apple and the movie loses its focus. She is frustrated that the police are completely inept at alleviating her fears with the investigation of David´s murder and she begins to become more and more frightened. Erica goes out and purchases herself a gun through illegal means to defend herself. Instead of having her going on the prowl to inflict justice or have a believable event that opens her eyes as a vigilante, the film insults its audience by having her very quickly be a singular witness to a fatal shooting at a convenience store. This scene was just too convenient and filmmakers must have thought that audiences don´t mind having their intelligence insulted because they find Erica running into convenient situations where she can dole out justice with a gun. Every scene after the initial attack is just too damn coincidental and convenient.

When the film starts to get back on the right foot and finds Erica being the primary suspect as the vigilante by her new friend Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) while she finally is given the opportunity to seek out the bad guys and not just run into them on a nightly basis, the movie makes another huge mistake. Mercer is portrayed throughout the film as the most honest and honorable police detective on the planet. The film goes out of its way to let the audience know that Mercer would arrest Erica is it comes down to a situation where he catches her shooting a bad guy. But when the chips are laid out on the table, Mercer folds like a bad hand and helps her achieve her goal of avenging the death of David. This was another solid blow to the chin of the audience and deflated any dramatic momentum that was gained with the character of Mercer and the final climax where Erica discovers the identity of her attacker and her fiancé´s killer.

I just felt that "The Brave One" tossed aside any semblance of serious screenwriting and completely relied on just having things happen by sheer coincidence. I´m not sure if Jodie Foster´s character ran across one innocent person during a nighttime scene and the streets of New York were inhabited by nothing more than evil people. The character was a vigilante by defending herself early and this worked well enough, but when Erica ran across a character that Mercer had mentioned he wanted to get off the streets, the film´s convenient moments go overboard in a way that was far too laughable to allow for any dramatic investment in her turning the corner and becoming a vengeful killer and not a frightened woman simply defending herself against the hordes of rapists and murderers that crossed her path. The film´s ending almost made up for the earlier shortcomings when Erica went after the man she wanted to kill the most, but Mercer´s selling out was another horribly written plotline in the story.

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