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The Brave One

Directed by Neil Jordan

Written by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort

Starring Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard

Rating: *

A seventies' revenge movie with a woefully unconvincing patina of intellectual justification, The Brave One is the sort of genre movie that gets more credit than it deserves. That's thanks to the pedigree of director (Neil Jordan of The Crying Game) and star Jodie Foster, in her latest feminist victim/heroine role.

Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio host with a South-Asian doctor fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews). On her radio show, she offers impressionistic ramblings about life in the city, accompanied by ambient sound which she collects with her microphone and tape recorder. Her life is good, until.…

One night, after shopping for wedding invitations, they take a walk through Central Park with their German shepherd. The dog runs into a tunnel. Erica and David follow. In a moment, they're surrounded by one of those leering, undershirt-wearing Hispanic gangs that pop up in movies to terrify white people. After a few pushes back and forth, the gang starts beating them senseless with a pipe. David is killed and Erica transformed into a bloody pulp. Just to show the perpetrators are really sick, they giggle a lot and film the beatings on a cellphone.

The set-up recalls the standard rape/revenge-movie scenario ( I Spit on Your Grave) but Erica is not raped. The arbitrary sexual content is saved for the ER, where images of Erica's bloody body being stripped and washed are inter-cut with her dream images of her lover stroking her nakedness.

From that point on, the film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

When she comes to three weeks later, Erica finds the world a terrifying place, so she does what a gal has to do: She buys an illegal gun. Once she's armed, she can't leave the house without finding a new set of creeps to blow away: An ex-con attacking his Vietnamese wife in a variety store; two black thugs harassing riders on a subway train (hello Bernard Goetz). A smug, rich white guy, who's both a wife-beater and a drug importer, gets a particularly savage ending.

In her latest incarnation as a tense-mouthed, wide-eyed feminist victim ( Panic Room, Flightplan), Foster floats through the streets and subways like a pale, malnourished wide-eyed boy, dressed in a tank top, hooded sweatshirt and black jeans. Back on her radio show, she talks in her disembodied alto, and opens the board to the range of excited New Yorkers. They sound like Frasier guest stars, offering sound bites on everything from the virtues of payback to condemnations of the Iraq invasion.

Director Jordan has shown his infatuation with Martin Scorsese before (you could think of Mona Lisa as his homage to Taxi Driver) and there are obvious parallels here: The use of voice-over to depict the protagonist's interior transformation, the fondness for tracking shots, even a shot up a staircase that recalls Taxi Driver's bloody ending. At one point, Erica wastes a sleaze-ball pimp with a teenaged girl in the back of his car, and forms a maternal, possibly latently lesbian, bond with the girl. (After Erica visits the victim in hospital, a cop says to her with a meaningful pause: "She likes your … necklace.") But while Taxi Driver was electric, pulpy and deeply ironic about its protagonist's puritanical quest to cleanse the city and the entire political process, The Brave One is apolitical and irony-free. Though Erica makes references to American nihilism and death through quotations from D.H. Lawrence and Emily Dickinson, the movie is intellectually obtuse.

There are apparently only two homicide detectives working in New York, the comic one (Nicky Katt), and the sad, world-weary one (Terrence Howard), named Mercer. Mercer, who is pining for his former wife, forms a platonic bond with Erica. He's laconic and insinuating, she's intense and slightly flirty, but for all their searching gazes into each other's faces, their encounters feel more like a clash of acting styles than heartfelt communication. The negotiations aren't really about whether they'll sleep together but whether he'll bust her for killing people or allow her to continue her course of murder therapy.

In the seventies' revenge movies of the sort celebrated by Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, the primitive morality is secondary to the adrenaline kick of the action. With The Brave One, a putatively serious film, there's no such defence. The ending is both dramatically expedient and morally despicable.

The whole film might have been more plausible if Erica never woke up: if the entire story was a coma dream. Perhaps it was derived from watching a Resident Evil movie, with a boyishly clad Milla Jovovich wasting zombies. At least, no one associated with those movies ever claimed they were about justice or art.