The Brave One

This is what Photobucket gives me when I search for "The Brave One"

I can sum up The Brave One in three lines.

Terrence Howard: "If you try to kill any more criminals, I will bring you in."

Jodie Foster: "I will kill this criminal!"

Terrence Howard: "Use my gun."

The movie is good, but the ending is just...baffling. Props to it though, Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are friends in this movie. There's this scene where he mentions his wife and then I realized that this man and this woman who had just met each other and became so friendly so quickly weren't going to have sex. Mind....blown.

What? Seriously. Good for you. Good for you.

But Jodie Foster gets some pretty good one-liners. She's basically Deathwish Guy with some really great monologues and one-liners, "plus acting" as Garth Merenghi might say. At the end though, she's trying to fight the boss, but this room he's in is full of crap with mirrors and shit, I'm all "just close your eyes and listen to  the cock of the hammer. Use the force, and also Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster." Then the dude runs up and just fucking punches her.

Funny story, she almost gets hammered by a cock in that scene.

That's the strange thing--now I didn't catch the beginning--but Jodie Foster almost gets raped, like, three times here. Each time she does her "Brave One" thing, it's a situation where she's about to get raped.

It's probably intentional, having a message about violence against women. I could see Terrence Howard's turn at the end working that way--after actually watching a video of what happened to her on his phone--

--which is a great use of technology, and the kind of use that's woefully under appreciated in movies. They get guff for stupid Die Hard 4 bullshit, but when they use phones to do amazing things that phones can do it's great, and a pat on the back, however small, is deserved. Maybe Hollywood will never understand computers, but they'll just skip that and make cell phones work right.

All stunts performed by Amanda Tapping.

Anyway, when he actually sees what happens to her and how awful it is, and considers it something wrong instead of merely unlawful, he rebalances his alignment to do something more "Good" than "Lawful." It fits the movie well, in that a lot of it is about women; their security, their vulnerability, and their relationship with men. If you've never believed in Rape Culture, this movie won't convert you, but what it might do is give you a grounded perspective on where these views come from as Jodie Foster plunges head-first into a reasonable depiction of a corner of a world--our world--that most people do everything they can to avoid. What it occasionally lacks in story quality, it more than makes up for with heart, acting, and a belief in its message.

Let's continue making jokes. Terrence Howard's "turn" at the end is more 'Good' than 'Smart.' News flash Terrence Howard in The Brave One you aren't a straight arrow because you're a good person, you're a straight arrow because you're crap at breaking the law. Way to take a hit for the team though. I mean that. His response on that--though it was mostly cut by TNT--looked pretty great; getting shot hurts and Terrence Howard did a good job of convincing me that was one of the many parts of his character's plan that wasn't thought through all that well.

"Hey, shoot me. It's part of my genius plan."

*Blam*

"Huh. That actually hurts."