WhatzUp

The Brave One
by Derek Neff

The Brave One

Erica and David are young, hip, successful and happy together; something bad is bound to happen to them, most likely when they’re walking through the city they love at night with their dog. Didn’t anyone ever tell them this?

As the couple are taking a walk in Central Park the dog runs ahead into a dark tunnel, barking. Erica and David follow after, and they soon find themselves being attacked by a trio of thugs. David (Naveen Andrews) puts up a fight, but he’s no match against the three men. Erica (Jodie Foster) is then assaulted so badly that later, after waking from a three-week coma, she finds herself paralyzed with fear. That is, until she illegally procures a gun, at which point she feels empowered enough to begin, well, looking for trouble.

Wandering the city alone at night, Erica encounters a man on a subway terrorizing the other passengers, and she puts her shiny new gun to use. The same detectives who investigated her and her fiancé’s assault are put onto this mysterious case of vigilante justice. (Apparently NYC only has two detectives, since these same two men show up at every crime scene in the movie.)

One of the detectives, Det. Mercer (Terrance Howard), befriends Erica, not knowing or even suspecting (at first) that she’s the vigilante going around town killing criminals. Howard is a fine actor, and he is, frankly, too smart for this role. He’s like the adult who plays hide and seek with his kids and has to try really hard to pretend he’s dumb enough not to see the child’s legs sticking out of the end of the bed.

Listening to her in interviews while promoting the movie, Jodie Foster seems to think she’s in a really dark, edgy thriller. To me a movie gets “edgy” when you’re honest about a character’s inner psyche, not when you give a character all this moral wiggle room to play around in. As it happens, Erica always gets the right bad guy. If she accidentally shot an innocent person, even once, we’d have ourselves something truly interesting. (And we’d be able to discuss the full moral ramifications of vigilantism while we’re at it.)

Director Neil Jordan tries to convince himself he’s not going the low road by adding a few sub-themes about immigration, the Iraq war and genocide in Africa. Balderdash. This is basically a Charles Bronson revenge flick, but Jordan refuses to let it rip. Instead, he ill-advisedly attempts respectability by giving us endless voice-over babble and pointedly “serious” acting. (Erica spouts out wordy prose-poetry about how she just doesn’t recognize herself now that she’s killing people right and left. Do screenwriters Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor have so little faith in the audience’s ability to infer what’s going on in her mind without having it spelled out for them?) For such a potent subject, the whole affair seems curiously sodden, limp and uninspired, almost like it’s a Lifetime movie with f-words.