What as the need?

The Brave one is a classy urban revenge movie; but why make such a thing? To give women equal time, since this one stars Jodie Foster? The equivalent of Ms. Foster's character turning into a Bernard Goetz—who thanks to the illegal action of a hitherto moral cop, Mercer (Terence Howard), gets away with her numerous murders—is Foster's allowing herself to play a cartoon superwoman and thereby enjoy the heavy ego trip of completely dominating an action movie. Is this a positive accomplishment? The movie is completely unbelievable. Erica Bain (Foster's character) is barely out of her coma and back in clothes after the gruesome park beating that has put her in the hospital and killed her fiancé, when she's buying an illegal handgun, and then the opportunities to off bad guys just fall into her lap one after another, with little in between.

Nothing much else happens, except that Erica turns successfully from a nostalgic radio chronicler of the vanishing sights and sounds of New York (whose violence as seen in this film people have noticed makes it appear more the 1970's than the 2000's city) into a talk show host discussing how violence transforms people and whether vigilantes are a good idea. But this too is little developed, and implausible since her boss doesn't like such shows. The movie has little time for other events, and less for subsidiary characters like friends or relatives. A neighbor comes in to make significant utterances.

Erica declares she's been transformed into another person, irrevocably. She repeats this.

The movie shows off its superior intellectual credentials by quoting D.H. Lawrence on the hardness of the American soul and Emily Dickinson's "Because I did not stop for Death/It kindly stopped for me." But since Erica's kills are random, at least most of the way through, her anger isn't even shown; she just starts killing. She begins in that iconic moment of American cinematic violence, a fracas in a convenience store. Maybe the ultimate ironic treatment of this topos is a spectacularly gruesome shooting in a Greg Araki movie, The Doom Generarion (1995) which one wishes had put that whole Seven Eleven thing to rest. Anyway, Erica's kills have no emotional resonance. They're cold-blooded. Hints that in the movie she was to have grave doubts seem to have been seriously exaggerated. What's most notable to her is how steady her hands are. Killing makes her feel strong, and puts a secret smile on her face. She throws away a sweat jacket, freshens her makeup, and she's ready to go. One expects more shock, remorse, a feeling of schizophrenia, even, from this soft-voiced lady turned killer. The progress is inexplicable and meaningless.

The only scenes that have resonance in The Brave One (bad title; it sounds like a children's animal picture) are those between Erica and Mercer, the detective who seems to be on every case she generates (Terrence Howard). Though this relationship feels contrived and implausible, Howard's gentleness, his almost feminine sensitivity, together with his height and his natural elegance (which also Foster would possess if she were not intentionally so badly dressed in the film) makes these sexually repressed dialogues watchable and interesting. Compare this with most action films; though, and there's not much happening. Mercer's sidekick, Detective Vitale (Nicky Katt) provides a little levity, but otherwise The Brave One takes itself much too seriously, and this heightens one's sense of its falsity. This is a big waste of talents—Jordan's, Foster's, and Howard's. Howard does get to show us maybe the classiest and gentlest black urban detective yet in movies: too bad it couldn't have happened in a more interesting context. Foster seems to have gotten a big kick out of doing this. (Can she compare notes with Matt Damon now?) But she doesn't give us much to chew on. And the movie itself seems a dangerous and inappropriate anachronism. Does every American movie that's not a blockbuster or a comedy have to strive for hokey"significance" now? And are they all going to misfire as miserably as this?

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.