by Karyn L. Beach

The Brave One boasts an above-average cast with Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard and an above-average director, Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with a Vampire) but it’s an average revenge story and at the end of the day, just an average movie.

Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain - a radio commentator for an NPR-like station where she muses abstractly on New York City. She’s got a job she loves and a man she loves, her fiancé David (Naveen Andrews from Lost). One evening while the lovebirds are walking their dog, a gang of thugs attacks them. Erica wakes up three weeks later to find that David did not survive the attack. Alone and shattered, the police offer little, if any help. She takes matters into her own hands and buys a gun. She tries to do it legally at first but when she finds out the time involved in getting the permit, she decides to circumvent the law and purchase an illegal firearm.

Motivated by fear and revenge, she begins to kill those she comes across as wrong-doers – an abusive husband, a couple of subway thugs, a rich drug dealer. She even manages to save a drugged out prostitute (played by Zoe Kravitz – daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet) from her pimp. Enter Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), who comes across Bain while investigating the string of ‘vigilante’ murders. He’s also a fan of her show and experiencing a loss of his own (still pining for his ex-wife), the two bond. As it becomes increasingly obvious who the killer is, Mercer is confronted with a tough moral decision of his own.

There isn’t anything wrong with the performances of Howard and Foster, but there is definitely something missing here. Jordan did a solid job directing. In one scene, Jordan intersperses scenes of Erica and David making love with the doctors examining their post-attack bodies. We see the couple caress each other lovingly and intimately, while the doctors examine those same parts with a cool clinical distance. But there is still something missing.

I guess I needed more of a reason. We are supposed to believe that Erica begins to kill partly out of a desire for revenge and partly out of fear … maybe even a little bit out of anger. But outside of a scene where she is scared to go outside of her door, we don’t see any of that fear. We don’t see any anger and without those the revenge doesn't have any depth or realness to it.

She says in her voiceover, that she has become ‘another person’ as a result of this tragic event but besides the urge to off thugs and pimps, we saw no seed of where that other person came from. She throws up after one murder but then it appears to become more of a regular thing for her. I wanted to see more of the grief or the fear or the revenge that propelled her forward.

Unfortunately for me, The Brave One didn’t take any brave chances. It played it safe … even the end is a cop-out.