Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6174 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-02-11
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 117 minutes

Amazon.co.uk
Neil Jordan's somber The Brave One is reflective movie about a victim's sense of dislocation and isolation from her own life following a harrowing trauma, which will strike a chord with a lot of people who have known violence. The Brave One is also a provocative drama about the nature of justice, a theme explored endlessly in American movies that typically find law enforcement wanting. In Jordan's film, however, the conflict between instinctive vigilantism and legal protocols is approached with more deliberateness and complexity than usual. Finally, despite its seriousness of purpose, The Brave One, to a certain extent, is drearily tethered to the old atrocity-and-revenge genre, bumping along to the familiar, Death Wish-like rhythms of an avenger seeking successive conflicts with bad guys he or she can blow away.
Somewhat at cross-purposes, The Brave One stars Jodie Foster in a shattering performance as Erica Bain, a popular essayist on a public radio station in New York. In love and engaged to David (Naveen Andrews), a doctor, Erica and her fiancé are brutally attacked one night by a gang of thugs. David is killed but Erica survives, only to find herself a stranger in her own skin, facing down her fears by shooting violent criminals.
With the city riveted by her anonymous actions, Erica becomes an object of curiosity for a police detective (an excellent Terrence Howard) disillusioned by his own struggles to protect the innocent from truly evil men. Jordan's previous films (The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto) resonate with The Brave One's most interesting angle, i.e., that each of us possesses a hidden element in our identities that comes out in extreme circumstances, making us wonder who we really are. It's all excellent food for thought, but the film squanders much of its significance by thrusting Erica into numerous, outlandish situations in which her only alternative is to put a bullet in a bad guy. The result is a smart film tediously structured like a disposable B movie. --Tom Keogh

DVD Description
For Erica Bain (Jodie Foster), the streets of New York are both her home and her livelihood. She shares the sounds and the stories of her beloved city with her radio audience as the host of the show Street Walk. At night, she goes home to the love of her life, her fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews). But everything Erica knows and loves is ripped from her on one terrible night when she and David are ambushed in a random, vicious attack that leaves David dead and Erica fighting for her life. Though Erica's broken body heals, deeper wounds remain - the devastation of losing David and, even more overwhelmingly, a suffocating fear that haunts her every step. The city streets she had once loved to roam, even places that had been warm and familiar, now feel strange and threatening. When the fear finally becomes too much to bear, Erica makes a fateful decision to arm herself against it. The gun in her hand becomes a tangible way to protect herself from an intangible enemy... or so she thinks.

Synopsis
Oscar winners Jodie Foster and Neil Jordan team up for this tense thriller about a woman who takes the law into her own hands. After her fiancé is killed and she is left for dead, Erica Bain (Foster) stalks the criminals who changed her life forever.

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly good
'The Brave One' stars Jodie Foster as radio DJ Erica Bain, who when one night is walking her dog in the park with her fiancé, is attacked and brutally beaten, leaving her unconscious and her fiancé dead. The police don't seem interested in the case and screaming for revenge, Erica buys a gun and takes the law into her own hands, becoming New York's mysterious Vigilante, getting rid of muggers and murders from the streets before finding her fiancé's killers for the ultimate revenge.

I didn't expect much from this as I hadn't really heard a great deal about it and the reviews have all been fairly average but I was pleasantly surprised to see this was an emotional, exciting and extremely tense thriller that had me sitting on the edge of my seat, biting my nails in suspense for the whole 2 hours. The direction was really interesting as they focussed more on the bad points of New York, from the small shop robberys to the subway muggings, keeping to the back street locations rather than glamourising it with the big city hot spots.

The story was very clever and didn't drag at all or become too ridiculous. There's a couple of predictable bits but there's also enough twists to keep you watching to see what happens next. Foster's character came off as arrogant and unlikeable to begin with but really had me rooting for her as the film went on.

Overall this is a hugely enjoyable movie that may be a bit too violent and shocking for some, but is a good emotional revenge thriller that is also one of Foster's best performances I've seen her in since films like Silence of the Lambs, Flightplan and Panic Room. Highly recommended.

Underrated
This film seemed to slide in and out of the cinema before I had a chance to see it. I'm a fan of Foster's earlier work, but I didn't know what to expect from this film especially after reading the comments made by movie execs that they wanted to stop making films with female leads. I guess it's simple economics to them, but it seemed kind of harsh to me.

This isn't a movie for everyone. It's pretty bleak and contrived in places, but all of the performances are strong and the cinematography and direction are amazing. This isn't the new New York we see in this film, the safest big city in the world. Instead it reveals the ghost of New York, where senseless violence and cruelty dominates. Foster's character is a woman on a mission, and she manages to touch a lot of people along the way. A lesser actress wouldn't have been able to pull this role off, but Foster does it with style and grace.

This film is bracing and thoughtful. If you're in the mood for something different but still Hollywood, the Brave One is a good choice.

Familiar concept, but entertaining anyway
As someone old enough to remember DEATH WISH with Charles Bronson when it was released in c.1974 I couldn't help but think that this effort directed by Neil Jordan was rather too similar in concept. Way back then, Bronson's wife and daughter were assaulted leaving the wife dead and the daughter in a coma. Bronson then cruises the streets and parks of New York blasting nasty people to death.

In The Brave One, Erica Bain (Foster) is the victim herself, and her boyfriend is murdered, in Central Park one night. Once recovered she buys a gun and goes around blasting nasty people to death. As in Death Wish, the leading investigator soon figures out who the vigilante is and doesn't make any attempt to arrest her. So yes, all so familiar.

But I enjoyed it, I thought it was superbly produced and directed, and Foster as always does a great job in carrying a movie on her own. She's done it many times before and she still cuts it. It's not completely predictable, to be fair, and it does take some interesting directions, but ultimately it satisfies because it touches the nerve that is so central to the human psyche: the thirst for vengeance. In this respect, it hits the button repeatedly and you might find yourself muttering 'YES, that's the way to do it' after she fires her gun. Simple but effective, and for anyone new to this specific genre, great entertainment.

Unfortunately it does raise questions about the glorification of guns in movies, and how killing someone can make you a hero. In Britain we have a growing problem with street killings, not all by way of a gun but this film won't act as a deterrent, that's for sure.