THE BRAVE ONE
The Brave One
Rated R
Features:
I Walk The City: Director
Neil Jordan
crafts a movie that pays homage to the vigilante film genre - and turns it on its head Additional scenes
Running Time: 122 minutes
The Brave One is an intriguing and engaging genre film that takes the usual vengeance formula and turns it on its head. Instead of being the usual fare where a man goes on a revenge streak as seen in such films as
The Punisher
, last year’s
Death Sentence
and one of the staples of the genre
Death Wish, this film makes the vigilante a woman and how she handles the change of becoming a killer. The woman is expertly played by
Jodie Foster, who carries the film on her shoulders and makes it believable and takes us on this transformation with her.
The film is the story of Erica Bain (
Foster), a New York talk radio host whose life is changed when she and her fiancé David (played by Lost’s Naveen Andrews) are attacked while walking their dog in the park. The couple is brutally beaten and Erica wakes up in the hospital to learn that David has died from the beating and she has missed the burial as she was in a coma for three weeks. She goes home and is filled with a sense of fear that causes her to go out to buy a gun. She carries the gun with her and one night while in a convenience store, a guy barges in and shoots his wife in the chest. While she is hiding, her cell phone rings and the guy goes to look for her. Erica pulls out her gun and shoots at him three times hitting him in the neck once and kills him. She grabs the tape from the security camera and walks out of the store. This sets her down the road of vigilantism. She rides the subway and two guys steal one rider’s iPod and harass a father and son. They all get off the train at he next stop and it is just an empty car with Erica and the two guys. They make their way over to her and start to taunt her with a knife. She draws the gun and kills both of the guys and leaves them lifeless on the train. It is outside the subway station that she meets Detective Mercer (played by the always engaging
Terrence Howard). He happened to see her when she was in the hospital after the beating and recognizes her. They begin to strike up a friendship and she ends up interviewing him for her radio show. The interview causes her to learn of a guy that Mercer has been tracking for years and has been unable to arrest because they can never prove what he does. Erica will later kill this guy by sticking a crowbar into his head and pushing him off of the top of a parking garage but calls Mercer before she does it and this will eventually lead him to know she is the killer. On another night while she is walking home, a guy solicits her to get into a car to put on a show for him. In the backseat is a girl who has been beaten and Erica draws the gun on the guy and she and the girl get out of the car after taking his money so the girl can go home. The guy puts the car in gear and Erica pushes the girl out of the way and shoots him. The car swerves into the girl and the guy is dead in the front seat. Erica feels such remorse she even tries to turn herself in but then walks out of the police station. One day, Mercer calls Erica who has always been interested in his police work and he takes her to interview a witness to a murder in the hospital and it turns out to be the girl she rescued from the car. The girl doesn’t give Mercer any information even with Erica insisting she should as she was hoping it would help put an end to who she has become. Mercer finds one of the guys who beat Erica and David and calls her down for a lineup, but instead of identifying the guy, she says none of them were the guys that beat her. Mercer also found a ring that belonged to Erica and gives it back to her and she uses the ring to track down the girlfriend of the guy to get his address. Erica goes to the building where the guys are as Mercer figures out that she is the vigilante and he meets her at the building. By the time he gets there, she has killed two of the guys that beat her, got her dog back which they have kept since the beating, but is being choked by the last guy. Mercer makes the guy get down on the ground and in a turn of events, he gives Erica his gun to kill the last guy with so it will be legal. She shoots the guy in the head and then Mercer makes her shoot him with her gun so it looks like the guys were the ones killing everyone and she can get away with it. The film ends with her walking back to where the beating occurred but we know that she will never be the same person she was as the screen fades to black.
The DVD doesn’t have much in the special features category. It has some deleted scenes that don’t add much to the film and can easily be forgotten and are not missed at all. There is also a featurette about the making of the film and has the cast and crew talking about making the film and is an insightful look into the Jordan’s film. The real gem though is the actual film itself and that alone makes it worth owning this DVD.
