nan | 楠木

The Brave One, directed by Neil Jordan (who also brought us The Crying Game, some 15 odd years ago) and starring Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard, is largely a disappointing film despite the heavy-weight talents. At the heart of its flaws is the script and the morals behind it.

Jodie Foster is Erica Bain, a New York radio host so in love with her fiancee that it’s too good to be true. And it soon becomes nothing but a sand castle, when one night the couple are brutally attacked by 3 thugs in Central Park. Her fiancee dies. Erica survives, traumatized. The thugs are not found.

Erica gradually regains courage, forcing herself to live on. She buys a gun from the black market for self protection. When she witnesses a crime in progress and is cornered herself, she shoots. The criminal goes down. She is shocked at the fact that she had killed; but a part of her seems to crave for the satisfaction of fighting back, of using violence against violence. So the second time she encounters a hostile situation, she instinctively shoots…

And hence she begins a trail of vigilante killings. Terrence Howard plays detective Mercer, who is on the case; he develops a friendship with Erica the talk show host, as he is a fan of her show and he instinctively feels a connection between her and the killings. The rest of the script is spent on bring Erica to closure.

The film is a discussion of loss. Erica lives, but is a stranger with her old self, who died that night with her fiancee. She kills to vent out her anger at the dark side of the city, but she also knows clearly that nothing she does will bring him back. Jodie Foster, with a short haircut and dark eye-shades, looks hauntingly sexy in a lethal way – the perfect femme fatale. This is the type of character that she can portray with her eyes closed – a woman that appears fragile on the outside but has much inner strength.

However, Foster’s strong performance cannot redeem the fallacies of the script, especially the dubious morality of the ending. It appears that the writers couldn’t make up their minds regarding how the story should develop and come to a conclusion. The film would have been better if it focused on exploring a woman lost in grief and completely changed by violence; instead it uses a series of all-too-convenient plot devices to force a closure, when closure doesn’t matter much – after all, what is lost is lost, and any closure can’t change that.

5/10