The Brave One (USA 2007)
Artsy Crap is Still Crap
Directed by Neil Jordan; starring Jodie Foster, Terence Howard, Mary Steenburgen…
Once a director establishes themselves as an artiste it seems they can routinely get away with conventional schlock that would be instantly dismissed in the hands of lesser mortals. Witness the excessive praise showed on David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which featured some of the hoariest gangster movie cliches in the book. Or how seriously Paul Haggis’ pedantic Crash was taken despite its complete disconnect from anything resembling the real world (including a final automobile accident featuring not one, but two leaking gas tanks and a rescue from a car about to explode).
In the case of The Brave One, the disconnect between the film’s artistic pretensions and its low-brow plotting is so extreme that even some of the critics have noticed.
The film aims to be a realistic thriller about how the savagery of urban life could turn a gentle, artistic person into a gun-toting vigilante. But the plot is far too manipulative to be taken seriously as a realistic portrayal of anything. Incidental details also rarely rise above the level of exploitation movie cliche: Jodie Foster’s victim-turned-vigilante character is instantly skillful/lucky enough with a firearm to take out hardened hoodlums despite zero previous experience, and wherever she goes she finds thugs who need killing with convenient ease. The scenes portraying the psychological toll on our hero of all this mayhem don’t make the film realistic; they just add some grit to the revenge thriller vibe.
Were it not for the presence of people who have done much better work, The Brave One would just be a piece of straight to DVD schlock. As it is, you have to wonder what Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster were thinking. For her sake, let’s hope it’s the end of the road for a series of woman-in-jeopardy films that started with the excellent Panic Room (2002), continued with the tedious Flightplan (2005) and have now descended to this.
THUMB DOWN
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