The Brave One

You cannot think about this movie without thinking about "Taxi Driver." Every other review has brought this up, and I am not even going to try to ignore that. "Taxi Driver" was really started up Jodie Foster's career where she played a prostitute named Iris who is "rescued" by Travis Bickle. Now with "The Brave One," Foster does indeed come around full circle as she rescues a homeless girl who almost gets run over by a heartless pimp. Sooner or later, Jodie was bound to inherit the role of vigilante.

Along with "Death Sentence" (which I have not yet seen), vigilante movies have been making a strong comeback. This is surprising because the themes of "Death Wish" were themes that would work well into today's cinema where the moral line is more clearly seen. Of course, if this keeps up, there just might be a remake of "Death Wish" if this one is successful enough. Hollywood has already made just about everything else, so who are we to think they will stop there? They'll probably get all cute and try to do a prequel of Paul Kersey when he was a young kid and go to his time as a vigilante. Try to "explain" him, as if you can really explain anybody...

Anyway, back to the review. "The Brave One" stars Jodie Foster as Erica Bane, a radio talk show host on an NPR station. She is about to get married to David (Naveen Andrews) who is a male nurse that she is helplessly in love with. However, one night during a walk in Central Park, the both of them are very badly beaten up and Erica ends up in a coma. When she wakes up, she finds that her fiancé is dead and buried, and her supposedly safe existence in New York is utterly destroyed.

To feel safe, she does what many Americans do and buys a gun. From then on, she ends up in situations where she is forced to use it. Erica becomes a whole other person, and she knows that she can never go back to who she was before. Even she says it at one point that she is the stranger she never knew was there before this all happened.