The Brave One: Critic Reviews

Everything about Foster's ocular intensity is riveting, but little in this hushed vigilante drama makes sense.

The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.

Neil Jordan ought to be doing more challenging material than this overblown, overwrought thriller that has only obvious points to make about the moral swamp that is urban vigilantism.

Foster does her best with a flawed story whose ending rings even less true than the rest of it.

You may hate yourself for yielding to the expertise of the manipulation, but the vicarious thrill of The Brave One is the sense of pulling your own trigger on pure evil and watching the bullet tear through.

The Brave One is oppressively plot-driven. All the mood is snuffed out. The filmmakers so want Erica's actions to make sense to us that the movie usually seems illogical despite itself.

Two terrific lead actors under the direction of the estimable Jordan aren't enough to overcome the proven axiom that although you can make a bad movie from a good script, you can't make a good one from a bad one.

It's lily-livered narrative cowardice, and I reject it.

What the screenwriters don't achieve in dialogue, director Jordan often delivers visually. He and his cinematographer employ a particularly powerful way to evoke Erica's resurfacing. It resembles a slow blink; it suggest a brain grappling to make sense.

What could impel Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan to whisk us back to the bad old days of Death Wish and Ms. 45? Were their credit cards maxed out?

Psychological suspense is what makes The Brave One spellbinding. The movie doesn't dine out on action scenes, but regards with great curiosity how these two people will end up.

The Brave One is Death Wish with a guilty conscience, and while it may be a bit of a hypocrite as vigilante thrillers go, the internal contradictions of the thing make for a very interesting picture.

What might have been a serious drama about coming to terms with violence and loss turns into a crowd-pleasing and increasingly far-fetched remake of Death Wish.

Because it wants the applause both of the chatting classes and the blood crowd, The Brave One doesn't take a firm position about vigilantism.

Foster isn't the only one abused in this film. Viewers are, too.

It is vengeance porn dressed up as an important film, a reverse slasher movie feigning some weak pretense of meaning beyond its own bloodlust.

An ugly, manipulative mess.

The Brave One has opened the fall movie season with a bang, indeed with a lot of bang, bang, bangs. Don't miss it.

Foster's pistol-packing turn as an avenging dark angel nearly sustains director Neil Jordan's grim vigilante drama through a string of implausibilities and occasionally trite psychological framing devices, with deft support from Terrence Howard.

Worth watching for Foster's fiercely arresting performance.

The finale is bad enough to make you wish the actress were working more often, so that the blatantly commercial stuff wasn't all she was letting us see.

Uncertainty helps keep The Brave One on its toes.

A seventies' revenge movie with a woefully unconvincing patina of intellectual justification, The Brave One is the sort of genre movie that gets more credit than it deserves.

There's a lot to admire in The Brave One. It just doesn't cut as deeply as it needs to.

Although it is bloody and at times brutal, it doesn't revel in the violence. There's more to the movie than initially meets the eye for an eye.