“The Brave One” is not a revenge movie…or maybe it is. Or maybe it is, but shouldn’t be. Maybe it doesn’t know.
The tonal approach director Neil Jordan tries to take says one thing, but the plot outline he’s hampered by says quite another. This is a film that wants to be a thoughtful rumination on fear and identity, but which eventually can only express itself as an action thriller.
We can understand and empathize with our protagonist, Erica Bane (Jodie Foster), as her life and perspective are shattered by a brutal attack at the hands of gang members that leaves her beaten and bruised and her fiance dead.
The before: She’s a strong, successful, independent woman. The after: Emotionally frail and haunted by constant fear, she has to will herself to even go outside.
Erica has been irrevocably changed and she doesn’t recognize her new self. As she grapples with new fears and emotions she doesn’t understand, what develops is an interesting study of how fear has transformed her and of how she has to adapt and make choices in order to survive.
And then that goes out the window in favor of something easier, and all too quickly.
She timidly goes to the police station one afternoon to follow up on her case, and after being left waiting for too long, she leaves, frustrated. And that’s where the film jumps the shark. From there, she immediately goes and buys a gun and turns vigilante. Instead of taking the time to critique the deficiencies of the criminal justice system, the film offers the police station scene simply as a cheap segue between her beating and her violent transformation. Once she’s got the gun in her hands, the exploration of Erica’s fears gets pushed to the side. From then on, everything relies on convenience rather than circumstance or character motivation.
It’s as if the rest of the film exists in a vacuum — or better yet, a vigilante video game in which our first-person shooter goes from plot contrivance to plot contrivance and then advances to the next level.
(Spoiler: At the end, Erica has to kill Bowser from Super Mario Bros.)
Opportunities for Erica to kill people are so serendipitous, they’re impossible to take seriously — and they undermine the psychological torment that is supposed to be the root cause of her sudden vengeful streak. She goes to the store and happens to be there when a guy comes in and shoots the cashier to death. (It’s a scene likely inspired by the convenience store scene from “Taxi Driver,” but that scene was handled with much more tact and believability.) She takes the subway and happens to be accosted by two thugs who want to rape her.
She constantly finds herself in harm’s way because…well, because she has to! It’s a revenge movie! Instead of possibly looking at how her fears might force her to misinterpret a situation and act out impulsively or drive her to subconsciously (or consciously) seek out danger, the script instead conveniently brings danger her way. Maybe there’s meant to be an ironic undertone about how her fears are justified, but if there is, it falls flat. Director Neil Jordan — whose work includes the 1992 Oscar-nominated masterpiece “The Crying Game” and the great 1980s noir “Mona Lisa” — has long been one of the most interesting and challenging filmmakers of his generation. With “The Brave One,” he takes a potentially ambitious character study and leaves the challenge at the door in favor of convenience.
The most thoughtful sequences are those between Erica and Mercer (Terrence Howard), the cop who befriends her and resists his own instinctive suspicions about her potential involvement in the killing spree. There is a great scene at a bar where the two have lunch and over the course of a brief conversation, completely figure each other out without ever outwardly saying it. But then the film regresses into a silly and overblown finale that calls attention only to Erica’s actions, rather than the thought behind them.