The Brave One does for right-to-carry enthusiasts what 24 does for torture boosters: provides a fictive context in which their arguments, invalidated by reality, ring 100% true. Unlike Taxi Driver, another film concerning vigilantism and featuring Jodie Foster, The Brave One pretends to ask complicated questions, but is ultimately ambivalent about the moral and ethical conundrum supposedly at its core, allowing Foster's character - an NPR reporter (shorthand, you see, for her initial naivety, er, I mean, liberalism) - to strut and fret vis a vis her ultraviolent freelancing while making sure that the audience is never less that 110% on her side the entire time. A rogue's gallery of '70s era urban baddies - muggers, murderers, would-be rapists - get dispatched with a simple pull of the trigger, and who could possibly have a problem with that? Watching these carefully choreographed scenes from the comfortable omnipotence of my couch, I know that these scumbags deserve precisely what they got, and I don't feel the least bit "complicit", which is how I'm sure the filmmakers, who likely believe themselves to be raising "difficult" questions and issues, wanted me to feel.
Rather than turning the Death Wish formula on its head, The Brave One merely updates it. Sure, the muggers are back in Central Park, and the subways are again a lawless netherworld, but this time, instead of some kid getting his Walkman ripped off, he loses an iPod.
