The problem with The Brave One is that it’s not sure if it’s The Punisher as Jodie Foster or if it’s Jodie Foster as The Punisher. It’s troublesome because while director Neil Jordan thinks he’s doing one thing, it’s actually coming out as the other; a revenge fantasy the like’s of which has not been seen since Charles Bronson in Death Wish or a few weeks ago in Death Sentence. I’ve got to admit: it kind of scares me a little to think that there are this many angry people out there, but hey, it’s just the movies. Right?



Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio talk show host, who’s show discusses the wonders of New York City. She’s engaged to David (Naveen Andrews from Lost), a respectable doctor if ever there was one. One night while walking their dog in the park, they’re viciously attacked by a gang of hoodlums. Erica survives; David does not. Erica attempts to return to her regular routine, but finds it difficult to deal with post-traumatic stress – so she buys a gun, illegally. At first it’s for protection, to make her feel safer, but when her life is actually threatened, again, she takes action.



It’s just one of several indifferent inconsistencies in the film: be horribly beaten, lose your partner, struggle to regain a sense of normalcy, only to walk in on a pistol-packed domestic dispute. You could probably walk around Manhattan all night, every night, your whole life and never even find one tenth the trouble that Erica seems to. Of course, it’s just accidental, or rather incidental, slayings to begin with, then her vigilantism becomes for focused and planned out.



Unfortunately the filmmakers have conned themselves into thinking that their doing this great, insightful story about PTS, the whole thing seems to carry a weight of pretension it isn’t owed. If we actually got inside of the head of this character it’d be one thing, but we really don’t. The film is preoccupied with getting her gun in hand and shooting blatantly and obviously bad people. If there was room to think, it’d be different. If they let it build, the anger and the injustice, if we saw the psychological processes working themselves out. But actually, Erica starts shooting about five minutes after she gets the gun, and she also gets pretty proficient at it pretty quick.



I like Foster, but she is utterly zombie like in a lot of her scenes, you get no sense of any kind of internal monologue as to whether she’s wrestling with her moral and ethical concerns. Only when it serves the story does the acting or self-serving narration reflect this. Terrance Howard is good as a sympathetic cop, and I’m judging this solely for the fact that he was almost able to sell the audience on the preposterous ending. This utterly ridiculous and outrageous ending makes any small gains in the previous hour and fifty minutes moot.



If by Brave One they meant boldly being typical so far as revenge dramas go, then mission accomplished. Congratulations Neil Jordon, you’ve proven that women in movies can be driven by the same type of bloodlust that mal