The Brave One

Released: 2007
Crime, Drama
Director: Neil Jordan
Starring: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, and Naveen Andrews
Rated: R
Running Time: 122 minutes

The breakdown: A woman and her boyfriend are brutally beaten in New York and she's the lone survivor.  Afterwards, she tries to recover, but ends up being a vigilante instead.


I have to admit the only reason I wanted to watch this film was for Terrence Howard (who is gorgeous!) and he was great, looking all fine throughout the whole film, but the film itself was bit unbelievable (and not in a good way.)
So Jodie Foster and her fiancee are out one night in Central Park walking their dog when the dog runs off down a tunnel.  They search after it and find 3 hoods holding the leash, wanting some sort of reward.  When the couple refuses, they start to surround them and beat them up.  They end up killing her fiancee and she wakes up from a coma three weeks later to discover he's dead.
She has a difficult time returning to the person she used to be.  She goes to the cops for help, but is basically pushed aside.
She ends up at a gun store and decides she can't wait 30 days for a permit, so she buys one illegally.
One night at the local convenience store she witnesses a man who comes in with a gun and threatens the cashier who happens to be his wife.  He shoots her dead and Jodie Foster's phone goes off making the gunman aware of her previously hidden position.  She turns off the phone and reaches for her new gun.  When he's around the corner from her position she shoots him through the bottles on the counter, killing him.  She takes the surveillance video from the store and leaves.  She runs home and feels ok.  (Wouldn't we all after shooting our first victim?)
Next, she's on a subway and sees two thugs harassing everyone on the car.  They steal a kid's Ipod, bother a man and his young son and everyone gets off at the next stop except the thugs and Foster.  She's staring them down until they notice her and when they present a knife to her throat she shoots both of them dead and leaves the car when the doors open.
The movie continues as she goes around killing more criminals and bad guys and she never seems to think twice about killing people in the heat of the moment.  It does get to her over time as she knows she should go to prison, but she's not going in to confess to the murders either.  Of course, her killing people does not bring back her fiancee and does not help her with her grieving over his loss.
She has a radio talk show and is in the public eye so when she meets up with Terrence Howard's character, he already knows who she is and what happened to her.
There is a chemistry between them (can't say I blame her) but she knows it can't work out because he is someone who believes in the law and would have to put her in jail should he ever find out what she's doing.  (He is a very straight laced cop.)

Overall, the movie could've been really much better than it turned out.  The romance or almost relationship of Foster and Howard's characters is intriguing and I'm all for killing evil criminals, but Jodie Foster's character wasn't developed well enough to carry it off.  Jodie Foster is a very good actress and I like her but the blame here falls with the writer.  They show Foster's character doing all these cold blooded things, but her hands never shake, she doesn't hate herself or seem to struggle with killing people all of a sudden and I just don't think they showed enough of her personality to see whether this is something her character is capable of.

I know there's a lot of people out there who could snap and kill people.  I know that a lot of good people could become murders under the right circumstances, but what I don't like about the movie is the lack of character development here.
Terrence Howard's character is fully formed and you get a sense of what kind of man he is, what kind of cop, and what thought process he's going through.  With Foster's character it is unclear and that's what messes up the whole movie for me.

Overall, I give it a 2 out of 5 because it could've been so much better.  I say skip it.