THE BRAVE ONE [R]
Considering the hell that Jodie Foster’s characters have been through in signature roles like Taxi Driver, The Accused and Silence of the Lambs, there is a certain amount of support we bring with us to Neil Jordan’s modern revenge drama. His gender-flipped Death Wish, about a public radio host who goes fully ballistic on New York City’s shadow element after her fiancé’s brutal murder, gives us a fair helping of Old Testament satisfaction watching her do the things that the darkest parts of us might do if so primed. However, that only takes us so far, leaving the responsibility of going deeper to Jordan. While the Crying Game director creates a discernable, angst-flecked paranoid mood, his exploration of the transformative effects of violence is but a scratch on the surface of one big ol’ doozy of a subject. Foster, who also produced, is certainly not afraid to play vulnerable, and does so very effectively here. The big feat that goes unfinished, though, is her relationship with Crash star Terrence Howard’s cop, a by-the-book murder detective quietly frustrated by the shackles of always having to play by-the-book. Their climactic simpatico comes too abruptly, and while we can look back and see the ways that Jordan and his embattled trio of writers set up the connection between this justice-seeking yin and yang, the flow is unsteady. The movie is a cut above the recent and similar Death Sentence, which played things far less subtly (and without much subtext), but despite this one’s pedigrees, it comes off as a middling coulda-been. –Robert Newton