The Brave One Movie Review

The Brave One (2007)

The Brave One starring Jodie Foster is in the same vain as her recent thrillers, Flightplan and Panic Room, only this one is grittier and more harrowing. Foster is such a good actress in thrillers: natural, unaffected, threatened, plucky, looking like she means it. And Neil Jordan's "The Brave One" gives her someone strong like her to play against.

The Brave One is an interesting revenge flick, although it is bloody and at times brutal, it doesn't revel in the violence. There's more to the movie than initially meets the eye for an eye. This is about the psychology of revenge and whether a person who takes a stance as a vigilante has crossed over an ambiguous moral line.

Foster plays Erica, a talk jock on a New York radio station where she walks the streets and observes the changes that are happening in the city she loves. She's engaged to a doctor named David (Naveen Andrews). On an unfortunate night that they were in Central Park, they were mugged, he's killed, and she's badly injured. Erica survives, at least physically. Emotionally, she's a hollow shell. She spent three weeks in the hospital recovering, then it took some time before she gathered the courage to venture outside of her apartment. Her illusion of a safe city life is destroyed. One day she bought a gun and practiced on a shooting range where you can see fear turning into anger in her eyes. Erica is fear later turns into a misguided purpose as she decides to take matters into her own hands by punishing bad guys on the street with her illegal nine millimeter. Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) and his partner Vitale (Nicky Katt) are tracking down this vigilante killer; Erica steps forward at a crime scene and asks to interview Mercer. They developed this rapport as they discuss the ongoing investigation. Erica is terribly conflicted and puts herself right in his crosshairs when they go together to interview the one witness to her brand of justice. You gotta wonder how this is all going to end.

That kind of psychological suspense is what makes "The Brave One" spellbinding. The movie doesn't dine out on action scenes, but regards with great curiosity how these two people will end up. The Brave One is technically a thriller. There is tension and uncertainty, and an unconventional cat-and-mouse game plays out between Erica and Mercer. There's a connection between them but when they face each other on the benighted streets of New York, they are on opposite sides of that uncertain demarcation between law and justice. The Brave One is a smart and thought-provoking motion picture that re-examines a genre without violating its conventions.

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