Brave if you sit through this one
Years ago when I was desperately trying to ignore what my high school math teacher was saying, he spent an inordinate amount of time expressing the principals of a bell curve. Years later, he was right, there in fact has come a time in my life when I can use one.
     Jodie Foster’s career can now be neatly plotted along a bell curve; and finding the zenith is an absolute no brainer. Jodie typically makes about one motion picture per year but in 1991 she doubled that output, so there’s the peak of her career.
     By the way… the two films she made in ’91: Little Man Tate and Silence of the Lambs. One might argue that Anthony Hopkins carried the Lamb, however, Jodie was thoroughly convincing as the FBI agent chasing it. Little Man Tate was a remarkable triumph in which not only did Jodie star but she directed as well. One could justifiably rest the credibility of their entire career on those two performances — from her recent work it looks like she has.
     Back to the bell curve... and yes Jodie Foster was a ‘child star’ who’s been in the screen acting business since she was six; but, for the sake of my argument, we’ll say her career began in 1976, in her Oscar nominated role in Taxi Driver. Now 76 from 91 leaves us 15 years and 15 years from 1991 is 2006. So there’s really no point in seeing or discussing her latest film, The Brave One, because Jodie Foster’s career ended last year alongside Denzel Washington, Christopher Plummer and Clive Owen in Spike Lee’s Inside Man.
     Apparently Jodie’s favorite actor is Robert De Niro, sadly it’s not Clint Eastwood, as I suspect Jodie’s not seen any Eastwood films that pre-date Pale Rider. Dirty Harry and spaghetti westerns aren’t exactly chick flicks so we can forgive Jodie for having ignored Clint’s early career. However, if she had seen the Eastwood back catalogue, before reading her latest script, she would have known that she was about to make a film Clint made in 1983.
     That said, there’s no forgiving Brave One’s writers, Bruce and Roderick Taylor (who???) for ripping off the plot of Eastwood’s last Dirty Harry installment (before things got really stupid) Sudden Impact. In an ode to Clint’s landmark role as a California DJ in Play Misty For Me, the Taylors and director Neil Jordon reprise the radio DJ persona, casting Jodie as an off beat radio host.
      As in her real life, Jodie’s love interest in The Brave One is the, not-for-one-moment-believable, London-born Naveen Andrews. He has, though, in 2007 been a great deal busier than his more celebrated female lead, with two other feature credits to his name. One of those roles, as a biological weapons developer in Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror was a great deal more believable than the doctor he plays in The Brave One. Hailing from Asian stock, as the politically correct Brits would say (or from India as the rest of us would say), Andrews has had an unspectacular acting career, apart maybe from a support role in a very ambitious 1997 screen adaptation of the Kama Sutra.  A literary masterpiece, which incidentally was voted by the American Chiropractors Association as the book which has done more to advance the business of chiropracting than any other. Just like the Kama Sutra for somebody with a bad back, this film doesn’t end well for Andrews.
      In fact it doesn't begin particularly well either as he’s killed by muggers very early in the piece; while Jodie survives the attack and goes out and gets a piece of her own — a 9mm automatic.
      Then two parts Sondra Locke from Sudden Impact and one part Charles Bronson from Death Wish, Jodie spends the next 100 minutes of screen time blowing away bad guys in New York. All the time the murders are being investigated by Terrence Howard, who plays an affable homicide detective who’s apparently no big fan of evidence or preserving crime scenes.
      Terence is best known for his Oscar nominated role in that bulwark cinematic tribute to feminism, Hustle and Flow, which ended up with the 2006 Oscar for best song, It’s Hard Our Here for a Pimp. I said it then and I’ll say it now: it’s no picnic for the hookers either!
      In Brave One he ends up pimping out Jodie’s services as a hired gun, as one of the bad guys she takes down is a big time crook he can’t pin any charges on. Why? (see my earlier comments on evidence).
      The climatic final scene arrives. Jodie hunts down her boyfriend’s killer, Terrence arrives and talks her out of killing this guy with the old ‘you’ll be no better than him if you kill the killer’ line. I can’t say it was a compelling argument Terrence advanced because two minutes later the guy was dead.
     Then we go straight back to Eastwood and Locke in the final scene of Sudden Impact where she completes her revenge killing spree. Eastwood spares her the trauma of arrest and incarceration for her murders, casually planting her .38 snub nose Smith & Wesson on the final victim, telling the next cop, “I think you’ll find his gun matches ballistics on all the other murders.” Back to the future and Terrence plants the 9mm on the last dead guy and tells the next cop, “I think you’ll find his gun matches ballistics on all the other murders.” 
     It’s just so hard to believe there’s a writers strike in Hollywood.