The Brave One Review
By Joe Lozito
Heroine Addiction
Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are both powerful actors worth watching even in the most unworthy circumstances. But neither actor can save "The Brave One" - a vigilante thriller as misguided as its title is innocuous. Directed by Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game") with a plodding, ponderous pace and self-important tone, "Brave One" doesn't even generate the vicarious thrills required in a revenge drama.
Ms. Foster, stuck in her familiar intense-whisper-mode, stars as Erica Bain, a popular radio personality who hosts a talk show called "Street Walk". In essence, she records the sounds of her beloved Manhattan and ruminates on the city like Carrie Bradshaw for the urban planning set. One day while she and her soon-to-be husband (the oddly cast Naveen Andrews from "Lost") are walking their dog in a deserted section of Central Park, they are attacked and brutally beaten by a gang of racially-indeterminate hoodlums. He dies; she is put in a three week coma. Erica wakes, as one would imagine, somewhat the worse for wear. She takes an inexplicably immediate dislike for the officers assigned to her case. One of them dares to say, "we know this is hard." She replies, "
Do you?" That's about all it takes to cause ol' Erica to get her Charles Bronson on.
Faster than you can say "I Love New York", Erica's found an illegal 9mm and takes matters into her own hands, mowing down an improbable array of baddies (they all have "priors" so, y'know, it's all good). Mr. Howard, bringing his typical depth and humanity to the role, plays Detective Mercer, assigned to crack the case of the mysterious vigilante killer. Try as he might, though, he can't find the guy. By now we all know the story of the boy who gets into an accident with his father and is rushed to the hospital only to hear the doctor say "I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" Yes, yes, we know, the doctor's a woman. Someone's gotta tell this one to Detective Mercer.
"Brave One" belongs to a time decades ago when New York was plagued by crime on every corner. In fact, it belongs to the era of "Taxi Driver" - Ms. Foster's famous debut as a young hooker (there's a brief nod to this role when Erica saves a young woman from that fate). Ms. Foster's career has come full circle. Looking positively gaunt, she's become the Travis Bickle character, driven to violence by an impotent system. But it's hard to get behind Erica's plight. The script - by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort - is far too obvious to generate any real emotion. And though the attack is brutal, it feels exploitative. Worse, there's little chemistry between Ms. Foster and Mr. Andrews, so while you're sorry for her loss it hardly seems worth the resulting bloodbath.
As Erica keeps reminding us, with dripping sarcasm, New York is now the safest city in the world. That may be true in terms of street crime, but in the '00s New Yorkers have more global concerns. Ones that make "The Brave One" feel irrelevant. The difference is, in 2007 we don't need vigilante justice in our streets. These days we need it in our government.
