Rating: 2 Pulsees
Jodie Foster, Terrance Howard, Naveen Andrews
Directed by Neil Jordan
Rated R
The only thing saving this flick from a flatline is Phillipe Rousselot’s outstanding camera work involving unique angles, fuzzy lenses and vast aerial shots, but even that feels swiped from the work of Hitchcock and Kubrick.
The coolest thing about The Brave One is the opening credits and the blurred view of New York City through warped window panes.
The script by Roderick and Bruce A. Taylor is derivative and bland, with Foster’s Erica Bain the victim of a brutal beating in Central Park that leaves her in a coma for three weeks. She awakens to find the men have killed her fianc’ (Andrews) and stolen her dog.
It doesn’t take Bain long to realize the police aren’t as eager for justice as she, so she heads straight to a gun shop to take matters into her own hands.
Of course there’s the pesky problem of applications and a waiting period but luckily there’s a man listening who can help. He leads her into a secluded alley in Chinatown to sell her a 9mm pistol. It’ll cost her a grand, but only if it’s right then and there.
Hard to believe a grieving and fearful woman would be carrying around that kind of dough, but maybe he takes Visa.
So off she goes into the scary New York night. Though the city never frightened her before the incident, suddenly she’s encountering baddies everywhere she goes and she takes them out, one by one.
Her taste for blood will not be satisfied until she finds the men responsible for the stranger she has become to herself.
The movie is completely predictable, down to the dangerous flirtation Bain shares with the clueless Mercer (Howard), the detective assigned to the vigilante case. She charms him by seeming intrigued by his work, but it’s only an inadvertent plea for him to make her stop what she’s doing.
Foster’s performance is too forced, too packaged: the soft-hearted lover who becomes a hardcore mercenary for justice is a reflection of roles we’ve seen her play repeatedly and the toughness seems more a product of her own identity as opposed to her characters’.
With no statements to make, no solid foundation and flat performances, there’s nothing brave about this one.
