by John P. Meyer

Jodie pulls the trigger in this stylish, thoughtful - and brutal - Neil Jordan vigilante pic.

The Brave One

New York radio host Erica Bain has a life that she loves and a fiance she adores. All of it is taken from her when a brutal attack leaves Erica badly wounded and her fiance dead. Unable to move past the tragedy, Erica begins prowling the city streets at night to track down the men she holds responsible. Her dark pursuit of justice catches the public's attention, and the city is riveted by her anonymous exploits. But, with the NYPD desperate to find the culprit and a dogged police detective hot on her trail, she must decide whether her quest for revenge is truly the right path, or whether she is becoming the very thing she is trying to stop.

Source: Cinema Source

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In order for a vigilante revenge flick to click with general audiences (as opposed to hardcore mayhem hounds, who demand no prerequisites for the violence they crave) there needs to be a strong thematic set piece depicting terrible wrongdoings visited upon the hero. And if you're going to make your revenge-thirsty hero a woman, the bar is raised yet further, as women are known to be less violent than males of the species. (Right, ladies?)

So director Neil Jordan opens The Brave One with one of the more brutal and relentless physical attacks in recent cinema, and he magnifies the visual impact of the violence by having the attackers - a mixed-race motley crew of Central Park hoods - record their own exploits with a hand-held videocam.

Jodie Foster - looking fit, trim and vaguely elfin in short-cropped coif - plays Erica Bain, a kind of Big Apple foley artist who ambles the avenues with an tape machine and microphone, digitizing the voices of vapor rising from steam grates and auto tires hissing across wet pavement. She shares her aural diary entries with radio listeners on a popular late-night show, sandwiching them between her own somnolent smoky-voiced commentaries. All very laid-back and poetic; perfect fare for the taxi drivers and stakeout policemen.

Erica's betrothed to a gentle yet hunky artistic chap named David (Lost's Naveen Andrews); they're in the midst of planning the details of their wedding when - on an evening dog-walking outing in Central Park - they are accosted by the aforementioned thugs in a tunnel near Strangers' Gate. Erica and David are initially beaten with fists; they beg for mercy, offering up their possessions without objection as they've no doubt been told to do in the event of a mugging, but these assailants seem more interested in dismantling their physical integrity than making off with their possessions - although they do particularly covet the dog. What began with fists ends with bricks and stones, and by the time Erica and David reach the hospital they are mangled beyond recognition.

"Take my wife's wallet - please!"

Director Jordan juxtaposes scenes of emergency medical staff scissoring the blood-soaked clothing from David with Erica's tender memories of more intimate disrobing; the contrast is jarring and effectively pathetic.

When, after weeks of recovery, Erica leaves the hospital, she does so alone and - to her dismay - trepidatious of walking the streets among the people with whom she heretofore felt so comfortable. She is unmanned by the trauma of her attack and deprived of her old sense of the rightness of things around her: something's rendered her Denmark rotten, and its name is fear.

For Erica, the stakes are high, because she's emotionally and practically invested in this big bad beautiful beast of a city; if she's ever to feel confident on the streets of New York again she'll require an anodyne for her crippling fear, and she finds it in the talisman of a handgun purchased from an opportunistic black marketeer. (The gun store owner she visits tells her she'll need to wait a month for the permit paperwork to clear. "I won't last a month," she informs him, exiting the premises).

The piece Erica acquires (for a cash grand) is a purse-friendly slab-sided hammerless auto, along with which the seller kindly includes a box of bullets. Instead of visiting a shooting range, Erica hones her marksmanship by seeking out predatory targets of opportunity, which are not slow about appearing. Her initial "training session" is brought about by the most ill-timed instance of cell phone ringing you'll have seen since a similar incident messed up Jack Bauer's timing in last season's 24.

Either Terence is very tall or Jodie is vertically challenged

Along the annealing shootout trail Erica crosses paths with a police detective named Mercer (the ever-impressive Terence Howard) who seems to think at first that the skinny blond chick who turns up among the oglers at the scene of a shooting skates off his suspect list due to her status as a bona fide member of the media; she even pursues an interview with the handsome cop to further muddy the motivating waters. Erica comes to respect and admire the canny investigator, while for his part Mercer displays an amazing quotient of professional restraint by subverting any romantic overtures toward the clearly troubled (though strangely attractive, in an angular, silky-voiced, gunsmoke-scented sort of way) news dame.

As the cathartic thinning out of urban predators continues and our heroine grows into her new identity (for though her name and countenance remain the same, the devastation she's endured has fundamentally changed her), Erica begins to expand her homicidal activities into unexpected and more directed territory, endangering her anonymity in the process. By the time she confronts her original attackers (as the formula for this kind of story demands that she eventually do), she has become an engine without a throttle, a weapon without conscience; she's discovered the trick to winning in violent encounters, and that is to bypass entirely the higher human faculty for moral reflection that stays our hands in crisis situations. She just pulls the trigger.

What lifts this thoughtful vengeance tale above the sensationalist crowd (aside from its thoughtfulness) is an affecting and nuanced performance by Ms. Foster. As Erica emerges from the butterfly cocoon of her convalescence, we can trace the disintegration of her humanity through the hardening of her heart. The transformation plays out across her face in the aftermath of violent encounters, while during her reflective conversations with Mercer we sense her slipping beyond human reach or spiritual salvation.

When she starts quoting Emily Dickinson, it's clear all hope is lost.

Director Jordan emphasizes the disorienting nature of randomized urban violence through the use of tilted camera angles and unconventional points of view. He succeeds spectacularly in immersing us in the psyche of someone affected by that violence. However, the outcome of events he and his scripters present to us in the final reel is - how shall I put this? - satisfying to our reptilian hind brains while decidedly unpalatable to our higher selves. (For those of us who profess to higher-selfdom, anyway.)

SUSPECT DESCRIPTION: "He used to be a roadie for Aerosmith. I don't think those guys had a dental plan." - Detective Vitale (Nicky Katt)

METAMORPHOSIS: "How do you put it back together after what happened to you?" - Mercer to Erica Bain

"You become someone else." - Erica's reply