"The Brave One" is like a rollicking party that ends with a neighbor calling the cops. Enjoyed it all ... until the end.
That's the oxymoron of "The Brave One," a dark drama starring Jodie Foster as Erica Bain, a New York radio host who loses all she holds dear one night. What starts as a peaceful nighttime stroll in the park with her fiance, David (Naveen Andrews), and their dog ends in savagery, blood and anguish.
- Starring: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard
- Director: Neil Jordan
- Rating: R for strong violence, language and some sexuality
- Web site: thebraveone.warnerbros.com
Thugs snatch their dog's leash and taunt, menace and viciously batter the couple, killing David and leaving Erica near death.
When she regains consciousness after three weeks, she discovers not only is David dead but she missed his service. "He's gone, honey. He would've been happy that you lived," his mother tells her.
She lived but she's not living. At first, Erica has trouble mustering the courage to leave her apartment. The city and the streets she once embraced now spook her; she decides she needs a gun to get through the night and day.
Caught at another crime scene -- this woman has the world's worst luck -- she takes matters into her own quivering hands.
She compares New York to a mutating organism but she's changing along with the city. Erica is turning into a stranger, and one who is the least likely vigilante the police can imagine: a petite, lean blonde who looks nothing like Bernhard Goetz or Travis Bickle, before or after the mohawk.
Among the cops trying to connect seemingly random crimes is detective Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard) who is a brokenhearted insomniac like Erica. He and his flippantly funny partner (Nicky Katt) can use the tools in their arsenal to try to find the urban outlaw who has New Yorkers divided on whether street justice is good or bad for the city.
By the time the story ends, the radio callers aren't the only ones weighing in on what it means to have blood on your hands or a hole in your soul or a stranger staring back from the mirror.
"The Brave One," directed by Neal Jordan ("The Crying Game," "The End of the Affair," "Mona Lisa"), once again taps into Foster's riveting intensity. She displayed it, most recently in "Flightplan" as a widow who turns ferocious when her daughter goes missing on a jumbo jet, and in "Panic Room," as a newly divorced mother who will do anything to protect her child.
Although Jordan uses all manner of tricks to get us inside Erica's head -- camera angles that skew her world and our view, a wardrobe that darkens to gray and then black, voiceovers from her NPR-style radio show -- he mainly lets us watch Foster act.
Teaming her with Howard, an Oscar nominee for "Hustle & Flow" and a welcome addition to any cast, was a smart move that lends a freshness to the film. The same is true of casting London-born Andrews (Sayid Jarrah on "Lost") as Erica's fiance and Katt as the master of one-liners.
As we know all too well, violence and injustice are much with us, making the movie as timely as ever. Like "Death Sentence," starring Kevin Bacon as a father hellbent on avenging his son's murder, "The Brave One" depicts an ordinary citizen taking justice into her own hands. It also questions the competence or the role of the police.
"You're the good guys. How come it doesn't feel like that?" Erica asks a couple of detectives. She's barely even a cog in the wheels of justice when she tries to check on the status of her case.
Where "The Brave One" stumbles -- in addition to its horrible title, which sounds like an Audie Murphy movie -- is its ending. Was it conclusion by committee (the original screenplay was written by father and son Roderick and Bruce A. Taylor, with Cynthia Mort later hired to lend a female voice) or simply a twist that springs from a shaky foundation?
By trying to somehow please or appease the audience, it could do the opposite. And by stepping into the gray zone, it leaves moviegoers in a fog.
First Published: September 14, 2007, 8:00 a.m.
