Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 11/11/2008 Run time: 122 minutes Rating: R

Neil Jordan's somber The Brave One is a lot of things. A reflective movie about a crime victim's sense of dislocation and isolation from her own life following a harrowing trauma, the film 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

The Brave One has lots of action, drama, and suspense.
It will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Usually Foster chooses roles that are a bit different. I'm assuming because her character faces a devasting loss and stripped of her confidence she chose to this movie. The problem is not with Foster though who is always good. Although I sympathized with her character it still felt like her vigalante methods were not a good way to heal. Howard also is good as the cop who gets frustrated when the bad guys get away with murder. See it for the performances, but I didn't see anything new here about street justice. The message seemed to be that it's a good way to right the wrongs.

oh my god, I love Jodie Foster and yet felt like she was asleep throughout this movie. A frustrating waste of time.

Violent and pointless. It will make you afraid to step foot in NYC, with it's portrayal of random street and subway violence. Also, Nicky Katt, one of my fave actors, has just a bit role.

The Brave One was an excellent film which deserves a five star rating. Besides the very excellent action story featuring an abundance of action and violence, this story has a lot to say about never being able to return to who you were prior to being made the victim of a violent crime.

The story makes a convincing case for the idea that extreme trauma almost always prevents one from returning to that innocent "person", or possessing that tranquil state of mind he or she believed they were in prior to being a victim of violence. That person is dead and gone, always replaced by a new person having no "illusions" or ideals about safety, truth or justice.

The question is how to proceed from that point on. The idea that revenge and violence is inescapable is troubling, but I don't believe it to be necessarily true as Jodie Foster's character emphatically did. Nevertheless, this story was a chilling and exciting roller coaster of a film and I recommend it for all fans of action movies as well as wonderful Jodie Foster.