As for Howard, he's as relaxed and charismatic as ever. But we never get a sense of why Sean feels a connection to Erica, or why he can't see what's so obvious to the audience - namely, that this gal is a couple of playing cards short of a full deck.
Photographed by Phillippe Rousselot, who also shot Jordan's two best-looking movies, The Miracle and Interview With the Vampire, The Brave One takes place in a dark-hued, strangely barren universe - a New York that seems to be on the teetering point of apocalypse. (Maybe Rousselot, too, thought the whole thing was supposed to be a dream sequence.)
But pretty images do not a great movie make. And the longer The Brave One drags on, the more plainly insulting it becomes. The screenplay does a series of perverse backflips to guarantee a happy ending - but the ending makes no sense either dramatically or thematically. Is this truly Foster and Jordan's idea of provocation, a movie that lets the audience brush off any troubling moral questions about vigilantism like pesky lint on a blazer? Did they really think they could patch up the movie's gaping plot holes with a rabbit-out-of-the-hat solution that wouldn't pass muster on an episode of Law & Order?
Forget Taxi Driver; The Brave One isn't even good enough to earn comparisons to DC Cab.
RSS