Susan Granger’s review of “The Brave One” (Warner Bros.)
Victim to vigilante: that’s the emotional journey Jodie Foster takes in this action drama that switches gender with Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish.”
Erica Bain (Foster) is the Manhattan-enthusing host of an FM-radio show, “Street Walk,” sharing her sentiments and recorded sounds from around the Big Apple. One night, as she and her fiancŽ David (“Lost’s” Naveen Andrews) walk their dog along a deserted path in Central Park, they’re brutally mugged. David dies – and Erica is left so emotionally devastated that she buys a 9mm handgun, ostensibly for protection in the city that she loves yet now fears.
But when she witnesses a subway attack, her pent-up rage erupts and she impulsively shoots the punks responsible. Empowered, she then wipes out a shooter in a convenience-store, a high-profile crook and a junkie who abducted a prostitute. In the meantime, she’s befriended by an NYPD detective (Terrence Howard) grappling with his own moral conflict as they hunt down David’s killers.
Written by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort and smartly directed by Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “Breakfast on Pluto”), despite some inherent implausibility, it’s a multi-layered psychological revenge thriller about the survivor of a violent crime who is determined to regain control of her own life, even if that means prowling the streets at night, deliberately setting herself up as bait.
Admittedly and unabashedly subversive, it’s bound to incite controversy, along with accolades for Jodie Foster’s astonishing performance, one of the best of her career. And Terrence Howard delivers on the promise he displayed in “Hustle & Flow” and “Crash.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Brave One” is an almost tortuously high-tension, exciting 8. “Someone is playing God out there – in the name of justice.”
