Reel To Reel: The Brave One

Is happiness really a warm gun?

How It Rates: ***1/2
Starring: Jodie Foster
Rated: R
Red Flags: Graphic Gunplay, Gunshots and Bloodletting, Language, Brief Sex

The Brave One is not a revenge film. It's a justice film that uses revenge as its implementation, which puts it more in line with Taxi Driver than Death Wish. Revenge films don't brood on moral ambiguity or self-identity. They kill people and like it.

It's a neat coincidence finding Jodie Foster in a movie that conjures up her Scorsese past while avoiding more than a touch of Charles Bronson. She plays Erica Bain, a public-radio essayist who walks around New York City with a microphone collecting sounds and thoughts which she disperses a la Gabriel Noone in The Night Listener. She's in a stable relationship with her boyfriend until they take an after-dark walk in Central Park and run into a pair of thugs who beat them senseless. Erica survives, but her boyfriend doesn't.

She comes out of a coma into a state of fear. She's unable to walk without thinking the next person on the street may be out to mug her. The police make no progress on finding the attackers, and Erica is treated like a patient in a waiting room at the station house. She decides to buy a handgun -- illegally, because she doesn't see herself surviving a waiting period -- with no firearms training. While grabbing a soda in a corner market, she gets caught in the middle of a stick-up and guns down an armed robber before he shoots her. From there, Erica realizes she is a different person, but who? She is a vigilante and still a victim. She guns down a couple of more thugs on the subway who try to rob her, but her demeanor is like a tiger ready to pounce. More bodies drop.

Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) follows the string of killings with the smarts only one homicide gumshoe is allowed to have at a time in cop movies. Yet the prime suspect is right in front of him, having seen Erica when she was in the hospital and heard her on the radio. The two draw into a relationship of mutual anxiety and frustration, both of them ticked off at what police can't do or aren't doing in what Bain calls "the safest big city in the world." Much of the movie's tension hangs on whether Mercer will figure out the truth about Bain, or whether Bain will mess up and leave the clue Mercer needs to jail her.

A lot of people are going to tell you Foster's character has blood lust. I will tell you she is the reluctant assassin, somebody who lives two lives in one body and can't reconcile them. Consider carefully how she reacts after each homicide. Here is a soft-spoken radio companion capable of murder, but only because she needs to banish the memories of her own helplessness, fight her fear, and re-establish some sense of justice in the world. Killing is not a thrill for her, it's a coping mechanism. Mercer is a cop who's worked with the system long enough to know all the loopholes and technicalities, and he knows when he can exploit a few of them.

Homicide is justifiable under the law when lives are put in danger. What counts as danger, however, is redefinable. Nearly every one of Bain's killings could be argued as self-defense by a competent lawyer. I doubt a jury would convict her. A jury refused to convict NYC subway vigilante Bernard Goetz on murder charges, after all. But if shooting people who try to kill us is supposed to make us feel safer or more secure, this film should erase those thoughts.