Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Jodie Foster is out for vengeance in ‘The Brave One’

The vengeance impulse may be fairly evenly spread across the global human gene pool, but two centuries of frontier vigilante justice in pursuit of manifest destiny has given our homegrown strain of this virulent emotion a particularly sharp edge.

In the movies, quite often a good thematic reflection of the American psyche, the revenge theme hit a high-water mark of sorts with the 1974 Charles Bronson classic, “Death Wish.”

For better or worse, that flick told its story — muggers kill a woman and rape her daughter, after which the husband/father wreaks bloody havoc on street thugs across New York City — about as well as it could be told.

That may be one reason why the Kevin Bacon film “Death Sentence,” a fairly close remake of Bronson’s flick, has made nary a ripple at the octoplex and is already sinking out of sight just a couple of weeks after its release.

“The Brave One,” in contrast, may have more staying power, for the simple reason that it cuts against the grain by making its avenging vigilante not a tough, muscular hombre, but a petite, mild-mannered woman named Erica Bain (Jodie Foster).

Yet the theme remains the same; not for nothing is this D.H. Lawrence quote dropped about halfway into their film: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

Erica wanders New York with a big audio recorder, pulling in the city’s sounds and rhythms and then riffing on them on her radio show. With a rewarding job and an imminent wedding to a cute doctor, David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews of TV’s “Lost”), her life seems fairly idyllic.

Then they go out for a stroll one night and stumble into the city’s underbelly. A bunch of hopped-up thugs beat David to death and come so close to doing the same to Erica that she’s in a coma for three weeks.

Even after she’s able to venture out again, she remains jittery. So ... she buys a gun, which she promptly uses to blow away a convenience store robber after he murders the clerk in cold blood.

Although sickened by her own actions (“It’s numbing to find that inside you is a stranger,” she says), Erica learns that revenge is not only a dish best served cold, it’s also a highly addictive rush that’s not easily kicked.

And so she goes out looking for trouble, even as she prays that someone will stop her. As her aim improves on each deadly foray, the NYPD gets hot on the trail in the form of homicide detective Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard).

“The Brave One” is the latest reflection of Foster’s career-long attraction to steely-female-in-distress roles (“Taxi Driver,” “The Accused,” “Panic Room,” “Silence of the Lambs”), and Erica Bain is a meaty role that is sure to land her another Oscar nomination.

At 44, Foster’s natural beauty has matured in fascinating ways, and director Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”) repeatedly zooms in on her face as she radiates every nuance of Erica’s pain, rage and confusion. And the underrated Howard, with his soulful eyes and laconic manner, makes a superb yin to her yang.

While their performances pack a wallop, the story grows more improbable even within its own exaggerated context as Mercer comes closer to sniffing Erica out. When the explosive climax unfolds, one character is turned practically inside out to a degree that’s pretty tough to swallow.

Still, “The Brave One” deftly makes its point about how easily the revenge response can be evoked and stoked. At my packed screening, the entire crowd reacted to that scene by hooting and hollering in unbridled glee.

Maybe ol’ D.H. was onto something.

3 stars. Rated R for extreme violence, language. Opens Sept. 14.