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| Star Jodie Foster looks like she is blaming herself something terrible while holding a gun on this yellow-tinged poster for Neil Jordan's The Brave One |
When Erica Bain and her boyfriend are beaten up at random under a tunnel in a park in New York, he dies from his injuries. She subsequently loses her sense of self and changes into another person: A person on a vendetta. First based on self-defense, but soon after with acts of vigilante justice.
The Brave One is written by Cynthia Mort (Roseanne (1994-97)), Bruce A. Taylor (Instant Karma (1990)) and Roderick Taylor (Super Force (1990-92)) and directed by Neil Jordan (Angel (1982)).
I enjoyed the suspense-elements of Jodie Foster's (The Silence of the Lambs (1991)) Bain's relationship to the police detective (played by Terrence Howard (Fighting (2009))), who seems close to knowing her involvement in the deaths of city hoodlums, but neglects to actively find this out because he quietly condones it. But it is the moral question of the right or wrong of committing vigilante justice that is the driving core of The Brave One. In that light, it is an inappropriate title for the film, unless it is meant as a compliment to the Bain character for confronting her demons, which she does in the film. Inappropriate because it seems to have already decided that she is right to do so with deadly force.
The film is like a character study of that woman, and Foster is just the gutsy actress who can make it stick. The film has a neat visual expression and a sparse score by Dario Marianelli (V for Vendetta (2005)).
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Neil Jordan: 1994 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
Cost: 70 mil. $
Box office: 69.7 mil. $
= Huge flop (returned 0.99 times its cost)
[The Brave One premiered 6 September (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 122 minutes. Foster received 15 mil. $ for her performance in the film, reportedly the largest paycheck of her career. Shooting took place around June 2006 in New York. The film opened #1 to a 13.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent one more weekend in the top 5 (#3), grossing 36.7 mil. $ (52.7 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Germany with 4.2 mil. $ (6 %) and Japan with 3.3 mil. $ (4.7 %). The film was nominated for a Golden Globe, among other honors. Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5/4 star review, translating to a notch over this one. Jordan returned with Ondine (2009). Foster returned in Nim's Island (2008). The Brave One is rotten at 31 % at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of The Brave One?
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