Making The Brave One is like trying to cook an omelet without eggs. The director has all the finest ingredients to work with—imaginative camera work shooting proven actors in beautiful NYC—but he forgets to pick up the plot that holds all the expensive stuff together.
Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a radio personality who hosts a show about the joys of living the New York life. But when her fiancée is beaten to death in a senseless act of violence, she turns fearful of the city she once loved.
So far so good.
Her paranoia leads her to buy a 9 MM and a few scenes later she finds herself in the middle of a supermarket holdup, in which she, never having fired a gun, shoots the crook square in the chest through a glass of olive oil.
Hmmm…
Somehow Bain, never a crime victim until her late forties, begins encountering about one bad guy per week, all of whom she kills. It’s just all too convenient. After all, this isn’t pre-Giuliani New York that we’re talking about.
Then it starts getting really screwy. Bain begins to address the mystery vigilante on her radio show. She befriends Mercer (Terrence Howard), who is characterized as an accomplished detective, but in all actuality needs some criminology training. When Erica loses blood in a fight at the crime scene, Mercer doesn’t even go so far as to collect it, showing that the screenwriters don’t live with us in the CSI era, but are stuck in “Murder She Wrote” times.
It’s too bad for Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard, whose solid performances still don’t eclipse the other filmic elements that come together to make a product that is ultimately difficult to digest.
Two stars
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