by Rianne Hill Soriano

Created on: January 02, 2011

"The Brave One" succeeds in bringing depth to an admittedly familiar storyline. It is a startlingly inventive and thrilling film exploring the nuances of dealing with the emotional conflicts of fear and surviving the trauma of a violent life experience. The film is compulsively fascinating with its dramatic flair as a revenge fantasy about the character journeying the route towards vigilantism.

"The Brave One" makes a long and hard look at what it means to be a human in an era of terrorism and senseless violence. It has a post-9/11 sensitivity that attempts to tap into many anxieties and comment on the idea of righteous payback. 

Spiraling into the larger scheme of things, the film takes a familiar genre well: a vigilante revenge flick undermining a morality fable with an allegory about crime and violence. Upon its aspiration to be something more serious and contemplative, it becomes an emotion-filled commentary about loss, revenge, and redemption.

"The Brave One" revolves around the story of Erica Bain (Jodie Foster). As she romanticizes a New York of yesteryear, she falls victim to a violent attack causing her to be severely injured for weeks and her fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews) dead. From then on, she randomly encounters dangerous situations reflecting the urban conditions of New York of long ago - not exactly the present Big Apple’s yuppie public landscape. Being an oddly dated setting as it is, Erica buys a semi-automatic handgun from a black market firearm dealer.

The script is incisive and witty. The major reliance on tidy coincidences between the lives of the major characters meeting each other in all possible incidents is quite far-fetched in real life. Yet, despite such tough subject matters and questions about realism, the film is strong enough that the audience is drawn straight into its well-told story. Its engaging treatment definitely compensates for its certain gaps in logic.

The film’s many elements and the character’s journey is reminiscent of Martin Scorcese’s classic "Taxi Driver."

The elegant style and carefully weighed direction from Neil Jordan overrules the film's sometimes formulaic parts. Jordan attempts to shock the audience on how an ordinarily peaceful person becomes an agent of violence. He effectively utilizes the moody, desaturated lensing of his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, in coming up with a visual style that shrouds Manhattan in a foreboding dread

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