[Movie Review] THE BRAVE ONE
I’m a bit of an expert, if I say so myself, when it comes to ‘Revenge Movies’. There’s an entire subsection in my DVD collection dedicated to this very subgenre, which you can read all about here! The keyword in the term “great revenge movies”, though, is “great” because a ‘revenge’ movie is all too easy to make but quite hard to make well. Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme release a revenge-themed flick at a rate of one a month. That’s 24 revenge-themed flicks a year between the two of them and not a single one of them is good… let alone even coming close to being great!
The equation for making a truly great revenge flick is a simple one – take one protagonist, remove from him or her something which they care a great deal about a la Shane Meadows modern masterpiece Dead Man’s Shoes, remove it in as horrendous a fashion (however, the more horrendous the manner does not always dictate the greatness of your film!) like Alex Proyas did with The Crow, fuck up said protagonist in the process like in Tony Scott’s classic Revenge (now, the more fucked up the protagonist the better you’re second and third acts will be!) then send him or her out to seek and find retribution just like Tony Scott did, once again, with Denzel Washington in Man on Fire or Quentin Tarantino did with Uma Thurman in Kill Bill Volume 1 and Kill Bill Volume 2.
The term “Revenge” is a noun that means the harm done to someone as a punishment for harm that they have done to you or someone else. Never has one single sentence or dictionary definition provided more inspiration and plot outlines for the movie industry then that of the word “Revenge”.
Like my love of conspiracy movies, great revenge movies are up there too in terms of out-and-out adoration. If the plot has the word conspiracy or revenge in it’s description then you can almost guarantee my interest is recorded (It used to be the same with “sporting underdog” movies until it become readily apparent that the formula was so stuck in stone that they were being released at a rate of 20 a year, all indistinguishable from the original 70s or 80s trendsetter!) yet in both the ‘revenge-tinged’ big releases this year, James Wan’s Death Sentence and Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, I didn’t see anything particularly new or exciting in them that made me think I hadn’t seen a revenge movie of this type before and want to rush out and see them.
The Brave One has been getting some recent press (thanks Kristina!) due to it’s poor box office performance, in tandem with the failure of The Invasion (another female led genre flick!), leading Warner Bros President of Production, Jeff Robinov, to allegedly state “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead” which appears even stranger when you take into consideration that six months earlier the same person, Mr Robinov, declared that he saw The Brave One as having major Oscar potential for its lead, Jodie Foster, and its director, Neil Jordan.
One quiet afternoon off work, one set of limited options at the local multiplex and one itch to entertain myself somewhere where the missus couldn’t find me (long story!!!) all led me to decide to check out the film that was being talked up as Oscar-worthy as late as two weeks before it debuted and then dismissed as nonsense and a “purely, deeply, truly, madly offensive right-wing proposition” soon after it was released.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right, this IS the longest “introduction” to a review that I’ve ever written! 
Radio host Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is living what she considers to be a wonderful life in New York City. One night she and her fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews), are brutally attacked by three thugs in the park whilst they are out walking their dog. David is murdered and Erica is beaten so badly that her life hangs in the balance as she lies in a coma.
When she awakes, Erica is destroyed to learn David’s dead and so traumatised that she cannot sleep and will not leave her apartment. Soon, she finds that the way to overcome her grief and her agorophobia is to buy a gun and roam the streets at night looking to take her revenge on the men who were responsible for killing her one true love.
After killing a man in a convenience store who came in and murdered his wife in front of her, Erica finds something “triggered” inside of herself. Days later, she finds herself on the subway and about to be raped by two men (yes – this woman seems to indeed walk under the biggest, blackest cloud you could imagine!), so she “protects herself” once more.
Soon, the City of New York is fascinated with the exploits of this vigilante killer, and NYPD Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) is set the task of trying to catch this person, before he or she kills again. But Erica won’t stop until she has worked her way right to the door of the people who ruined her life by setting her off down this path in the first place!
Jodie Foster’s performance is central to this film. You can tell that just from reading the above plot synopsis. The thing is I didn’t “buy” what she was selling. It was a competent and thorough performance but it was an ever so slight variation on exactly the same performance she gave in Contact, excelled with in Panic Room and phoned in on Flightplan. Foster excels when she challenges herself and our expectations of her as an actress. Hence the reason she positively lights up the screen in the likes of Maverick, Inside Man, The Silence of the Lambs and/or The Accused.
Because of Foster not failing to ‘pull’ me in the film struggled from the outset, yet that’s not to say that the film wouldn’t have struggled anyway if Foster had been stronger or a different actress had been in the lead. The film doesn’t offer up anything new to the ‘revenge’ subgenre and a lot of the movements the screenplay makes and the directions it takes us in are stupid measures in a film desperate to be taken seriously and regarded as having an “intelligent point to make”.
Strip the film down to it’s most basic level and what you’ve got when you cut through everything else is a film about a woman on a killing spree in order to get her dog back. I genuinely believe that, in the same way that Flightplan was rewritten from a male lead to a female lead to attract Miss Foster, had the screenplay as it stands at the moment been rewritten for a male to perform then this would not have been greenlit or, if it had, it most certainly would have gone straight to DVD. The only concept that could be considered almost original in this film is the sex of it’s main character. But then you suddenly remember Tarantino’s double-tap of Kill Bill flicks and you realise it doesn’t even have that going for it. Jodie Foster, and Terence Howard – who is excellent in this, but that isn’t a compliment when you consider he is excellent in every single film he is in – are way above material of this type.
There’s an interesting film to be made about media glorification of a vigilante out to avenge a personal tragedy. It remains unmade because, despite briefly skirting in and around the subject, this film most certainly is not it.
The film will give you a relatively entertaining couple of hours if you treat it with the same respect you would any below-par, bog-standard revenge thriller that you can rent from the bottom shelf of your local Blockbuster (and usually has poster taglines like “They sexually abused his hamster – now he’s going to make them pay… in blood!”) but if you go in expecting something of the calibre of Panic Room or The Silence of the Lambs then you are going to come out bitterly, bitterly disappointed.
Lower your standards and the film is okay. A solid middle of the road genre piece. Try to forget that it could and should have been way more than that though as there might well be far, far, far worse ‘revenge’ movies then this but, I assure you, there are also far, far, far superior ones too.
And what are these superior films within this subgenre? Well you wouldn’t go far wrong checking out any of the titles that have been namechecked within this review or you could just use Issue # 7 of OFF THE SHELF as your guide!
5 Responses to “[Movie Review] THE BRAVE ONE”
I’m looking forward to checking this out when it comes out on DVD, but it’s good to know that it’s more a rental than a purchase. One to add to the lovefilm list, me thinks.
The weird thing is Wyv, every year at the end of December I look over the next year’s release slate and I compile like a “prediction” of the Top Twenty films I think I’m going to dig or I class as absolute “must sees” and then I look at it again in a year’s time when I do my year’s end Top Twenty for the website.
Usually, and only by a few, am I ever wrong. This year? I’m totally out! My Top Ten alone is completely different to what I had predicted to myself it would be. There’s films that I thought would be quite high just on the pure escapist fun factor alone and they don’t even HAVE A PLACE by year’s end. There’s films that I thought would be of ZERO interest to me and they’re running quite a high place and there’s films that just came out of no where and blew me away!
This was one of those films that at the start of the year I predicted to be in my Top Twenty by year’s end, and I positioned it around the #11 or #10 mark. It won’t even garner a position if there was a Top Thirty!
That surprises the hell out of me!
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