The Brave One (Full-Screen Edition)
by Neil Jordan
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Jodie Foster, Mary Steenburgen, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt, Terrence HowardDirector: Neil Jordan
Brand: Warner Brothers
Producer: Aaron Auch
Producer: Bruce Berman
Producer: Dana Goldberg
Producer: David Gambino
Writer: Bruce A. Taylor
Writer: Cynthia Mort
Writer: Roderick Taylor
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-02-05
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- ?Why don?t they stop me?? Erica Bain wonders. Bain, a popular N.Y radio host, watched her fianc? die and nearly lost her own life to a vicious, random attack. Now she discovers a stranger within herself, an armed wanderer in the urban night, out for vengeance and at war with her own soul. Two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster, as Erica, joins Oscar nominee Terrence Howard, as a determined cop
Movie Reviews of The Brave One (Full-Screen Edition)
Movie Review: Feelin' lucky, punk?
Summary: 5 Stars
THE BRAVE ONE (2007), aside from being Jodie Foster's last good film, was always in my estimation an argument in favor of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. With her powerhouse performance, Jodie Foster shows exactly what many gun owners experience to some degree; at film's end we are left wondering whether we should own a gun also.
Foster plays Erica Bain, a New York City DJ who ruminates late at night about her beloved city. She's one of those sexy voices many people find themselves addicted to hearing on a regular basis, and is an excellent cure for the loneliness only a big city can create. In a brutal, sadistic attack in Central Park, Erica loses her fiancé David Kirmani (a very sexy Naveen Andrews). After awakening from a coma in the hospital, Erica suffers the natural meltdown upon learning of the murder.
This rather precipitate storyline interested me in one singular point: once Erica seeks to buy a gun and receive instruction, she panics and yells that she must have a gun immediately or she "will die". That reaction in the face of a normal gun acquisition struck me as the loud indicator that Erica is somewhat out of her mind. She skips the formalities and buys a gun 'out of the trunk of a car', as we say.
The scene with the trafficker giving her rapid lessons in a back alley is heartrending. Soon Erica is making her way around NYC, blasting away at all deserving bad guys. If you recall the tragic case of Bernard Goetz in the NYC subway decades ago, you'll understand her. Eventually she entices criminals only to shoot them down, but the first time she is forced to use her gun - in a store robbery - her horrible agitation and the adrenalin makes the scene that much more horrific and memorable.
She is watched over, helped a bit, by a police officer (the wonderful Terence Howard as Detective Mercer). He seems to be the left-wing anti-gun voice in the film, yet he, too eventually gives way to the need for citizens to be armed. In an ending I will not divulge, the audience learns all about guns, whether we want to or not.
As a gun advocate and one-time owner, which always shocks everyone, I loved this film for its unblinking approach to one person's need for a gun. Foster becomes like a junkie, spraying bullets quite expertly at the bad guys and glaring with maniacal glee once the job's done. She's protecting her city and its citizens. The fear of public retribution is probably what stopped this film from mutating into a weird vigilante-based superhero franchise.
The cinematography is in my view rather unique and stunning for such a film as this. The acting is top-notch, though Foster carries too much of it by herself and Howard is left sort of panting after her in certain scenes. I know Foster wanted this film to be anti-gun, and approached it that way. She succeeded in evoking the opposite feelings, and I'd show this film to anyone, any age, who felt compelled to get a gun for self-defense.
That is as far as I go in my appreciation of this film as gun advocacy; the producers would surely not thank me for it but there it is on screen! It is a real nail-biter, taught, tense and terrifying. A unique thing about this film is that I imagined every great director would have made it exactly the same way. That is one powerful film.
Final note: read the review by Bama. Bama is a brave soul who was attacked like Erica Bain, and that made THE BRAVE ONE real and therapeutic for Bama. The idea that the victim is in a way dead, is post-crime a different person, is a powerful agony we must all try to understand. And Bama says something very Buddhist: you don't have to murder someone to take their life from them.
If we learned that lesson, we wouldn't need any form of weapon at all.
Summary of The Brave One (Full-Screen Edition)
"Why don?t they stop me?" Erica Bain wonders. Bain, a popular N.Y radio host, watched her fiancé die and nearly lost her own life to a vicious, random attack. Now she discovers a stranger within herself, an armed wanderer in the urban night, out for vengeance and at war with her own soul. Two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster, as Erica, joins Oscar nominee Terrence Howard, as a determined cop hot on her trail. Erica?s future is uncertain, but one thing is not: THE BRAVE ONE is a high- tension thriller that packs a visceral and emotional punch.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
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