The Brave One (2007)

Neil Jordan's The Brave One arrives from 2007, a year in which a woman buying a handgun in Central Park's shadow still counted as transgression enough for a studio picture. Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio host whose fiancé is beaten to death and whose own body is left for the phone cameras of three men. She cannot wait thirty days for a legal firearm, so she buys one from a black market dealer and begins shooting her way through New York's more tiresome citizens. The film is a revenge machine, assembled with competence and a certain somber craft.

Foster's Erica does take violent agency, and the film lets her hold the gun, aim it, and fire it. That is empowerment of a sort, though the screenplay treats her transformation as psychological collapse, not a thesis. Terrence Howard's Detective Mercer carries a private grievance about a criminal he cannot prosecute, a subplot that never becomes an argument about the justice system or the color of the man navigating it. The two actors circle each other with the quiet precision Roger Ebert admired, and the ending, in which Mercer hands over his own weapon, is a moral shrug the film declines to resolve.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no celebration of the body as it is, no vocabulary for neurodivergence. Erica's wounds are grief and rage, nothing more clinical. The cast includes Naveen Andrews and Zoë Kravitz without commentary, which is how casting should work and how scoring works too. The remainder is a well-made genre piece with a magnetic lead, a Golden Globe nomination, and a number one opening weekend. Culturally, it is a modest vintage.