Revenge Be a Lady

There’s something dark, intriguing, and upsetting about Neil Jordan’s The Brave One.

Jodie Foster stars in this drama as Erica Bain, a New York radio host who, out on a walk on an uneventful evening with her doctor fiancé, is viciously attacked and beaten to a bloody pulp.

When she wakes up, three weeks later, her body and face badly bruised and scarred, she discovers she will never see the man she loves again. Her life has been forever and nonsensically changed. She used to feel safe in New York, but not anymore.

She resolves that in order to survive she must arm herself, but after she’s told that to get a gun she needs to get a license and wait a month, she says she just won’t make it that long.

In that moment, Foster is so fearful, so vulnerable, you’ll want to see reach out and cradle her. What happens next complicates this feeling of goodwill.

On a desperate impulse buy, Erica gets her gun, and then, on an uneventful run into a corner store, her life takes another turn when she surprise-shoots a man who has walked in with the sole purpose of killing his wife.

It is then that her rampage for revenge begins. Her actions are a coping mechanism alright, yet her hands are steady – she knows what she’s done – and the movie’s definition of bravery begins to shake.

Unable to move past her tragedy, she begins prowling the streets of New York at night. She’s not looking for trouble, but if it should find her, she will shoot it down. The new Erica suffers no fools.

Her pursuit of justice catches the city's attention, and the public is riveted by her anonymous exploits.

But with an NYPD detective (Terrence Howard) she’s befriended hot on her trail, she must decide if what she’s doing right, and how and when she will stop.

She’s conflicted, yes, but she also is quite wrong. And The Brave One appears to be OK with that.

This is a confronting movie, and an interesting one at that, but seeing this woman who would know better become a vigilante in order to cope…well, it just didn’t make much sense.

Worse yet, it just didn’t make me feel for her, and it didn’t help me see the light at the end of the tunnel that the twist ending seemed to promise her.

My Rating **

Photo: Warner Bros.