While watching The Brave One, you can tell the folks who made this movie were very pleased with themselves. They were thrilled with their own cleverness in making an urban vigilante film with a woman as their vengeance-seeking hero. They clearly thought they were striking some sort of feminist blow against The Patriarchy by doing so. Apparently they missed out on the whole Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Xena the Warrior Princess thing on TV that made women kicking ass rather cliché. Their self-satisfaction blinded them to the fact that their whole idea ends up being only half a movie.
Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a public radio monologist. She records the sounds of New York City and then weaves stories around that audio for her listeners. She's in love with a man named David (Naveen Andrews) and they seem made for each other, right up until they are both brutally attacked in a city park. David is killed and Erica is put into a coma. When she revives, Erica is consumed by fear and buys a gun to protect herself. It's unclear if anything else would have happened if Erica had been left alone in her pain and sorrow, but she gets caught in the middle of a convenience store robbery and shoots the robber dead. Then she shoots a couple of thugs on the subway, saves a whore from her violent trick, beats a criminal mastermind to death with a tire iron before eventually tracking down the men responsible for the attack on her and David. As Erica is doing a rather halting Charles Bronson impersonation, Detective Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard) is trying to track down New York's newest vigilante gunman. If you can believe it, the *ding* of a closing elevator door puts him on Erica's trail. Mercer engages in one of the most lackadaisical investigations in the history of crime cinema before finally rushing in, but whether it's to stop Erica or help her isn't quite clear.
Let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, Erica has one of those "Magic Negro" friends who dispenses world weary wisdom and guidance. I appreciate that in the limited time available in a film, it can be very hard to avoid using these types of characters. It allows you to make the points you want to make very quickly and clearly. But if you've got to use such a character, stop making them black people! Make them French or Chinese or Hasidic Jews or anything else, but the whole "black person opens the white hero's eyes to the essential truth they're missing" is not only played out, it's almost become a form of racial profiling. Stop it.
The scene I mentioned where Erica beats a vicious criminal to death with a tire iron is also beyond ridiculous. Jodie Foster is not a big girl and in the scene, one of Erica's arms is severely injured. Small, slim women with only one good arm cannot beat fully grown men to death, especially if those men are violent killers themselves. I mean, if you want to be taken seriously as a drama, you can't let overly melodramatic stuff like that ruin the tone of the film.
Putting those two glaring flaws to the side, The Brave One only tells half a story. It's all about Erica being so conflicted and angsty about killing the bad guys. It never bothers with the social and ethical questions raised by the vigilante. The story also never bothers to focus on Eric's transformation into a vigilante. The first time she shoots a bad guy it's self-defense in a random situation. The second time is just as random, but it's not really self-defense and Erica has obviously become a much more proficient killer. But we're never shown or even told about Erica practicing her marksmanship or training her body and mind for deadly situations. The movie dwells too much on Erica's anguish over what she's doing without balancing the scales by showing us the emotions driving her and the extreme effort she has to make to do it. Without that balance, you're left to wonder "Well, if it bothers you that much Erica, why don't you just stop?"
The Brave One also has an ending that could have come straight out of a Lethal Weapon sequel, but with Foster and Howard instead of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. It doesn't sync up at all with the tone and style of the rest of the movie, and I'd bet it was somebody's idea of a happy ending that got snuck in during the rewrite process.
Jodie Foster also gets briefly naked in this film, another example of Producer Self-Nudity. Be warned, however, her nakedness is thoroughly desexualized by mixing memories of Erica having sex with David with memories of the brutal attack on them. If you get aroused by nudity in that context, you should probably seek out a mental health expert.
The Brave One isn't all bad, though. Foster and Howard both do fine jobs and when they're on screen together, they're very entertaining. But unless watching two great actors give merely good performance is all you want or need out of a film, you'd probably be better off renting one of the Death Wish movie instead of this one. Even one of those hugely sucky later Death Wish films where it looks like Bronson needs a walker more than a gun.
Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a public radio monologist. She records the sounds of New York City and then weaves stories around that audio for her listeners. She's in love with a man named David (Naveen Andrews) and they seem made for each other, right up until they are both brutally attacked in a city park. David is killed and Erica is put into a coma. When she revives, Erica is consumed by fear and buys a gun to protect herself. It's unclear if anything else would have happened if Erica had been left alone in her pain and sorrow, but she gets caught in the middle of a convenience store robbery and shoots the robber dead. Then she shoots a couple of thugs on the subway, saves a whore from her violent trick, beats a criminal mastermind to death with a tire iron before eventually tracking down the men responsible for the attack on her and David. As Erica is doing a rather halting Charles Bronson impersonation, Detective Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard) is trying to track down New York's newest vigilante gunman. If you can believe it, the *ding* of a closing elevator door puts him on Erica's trail. Mercer engages in one of the most lackadaisical investigations in the history of crime cinema before finally rushing in, but whether it's to stop Erica or help her isn't quite clear.
Let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, Erica has one of those "Magic Negro" friends who dispenses world weary wisdom and guidance. I appreciate that in the limited time available in a film, it can be very hard to avoid using these types of characters. It allows you to make the points you want to make very quickly and clearly. But if you've got to use such a character, stop making them black people! Make them French or Chinese or Hasidic Jews or anything else, but the whole "black person opens the white hero's eyes to the essential truth they're missing" is not only played out, it's almost become a form of racial profiling. Stop it.
The scene I mentioned where Erica beats a vicious criminal to death with a tire iron is also beyond ridiculous. Jodie Foster is not a big girl and in the scene, one of Erica's arms is severely injured. Small, slim women with only one good arm cannot beat fully grown men to death, especially if those men are violent killers themselves. I mean, if you want to be taken seriously as a drama, you can't let overly melodramatic stuff like that ruin the tone of the film.
Putting those two glaring flaws to the side, The Brave One only tells half a story. It's all about Erica being so conflicted and angsty about killing the bad guys. It never bothers with the social and ethical questions raised by the vigilante. The story also never bothers to focus on Eric's transformation into a vigilante. The first time she shoots a bad guy it's self-defense in a random situation. The second time is just as random, but it's not really self-defense and Erica has obviously become a much more proficient killer. But we're never shown or even told about Erica practicing her marksmanship or training her body and mind for deadly situations. The movie dwells too much on Erica's anguish over what she's doing without balancing the scales by showing us the emotions driving her and the extreme effort she has to make to do it. Without that balance, you're left to wonder "Well, if it bothers you that much Erica, why don't you just stop?"
The Brave One also has an ending that could have come straight out of a Lethal Weapon sequel, but with Foster and Howard instead of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. It doesn't sync up at all with the tone and style of the rest of the movie, and I'd bet it was somebody's idea of a happy ending that got snuck in during the rewrite process.
Jodie Foster also gets briefly naked in this film, another example of Producer Self-Nudity. Be warned, however, her nakedness is thoroughly desexualized by mixing memories of Erica having sex with David with memories of the brutal attack on them. If you get aroused by nudity in that context, you should probably seek out a mental health expert.
The Brave One isn't all bad, though. Foster and Howard both do fine jobs and when they're on screen together, they're very entertaining. But unless watching two great actors give merely good performance is all you want or need out of a film, you'd probably be better off renting one of the Death Wish movie instead of this one. Even one of those hugely sucky later Death Wish films where it looks like Bronson needs a walker more than a gun.