Revenge fantasies come back with a...

By Frank Visco
Collegian Editor
September 19, 2007

About 32 years after Charles Bronson sired the genre with Death Wish, revenge fantasies have become a mainstay in American cinema. Year-to-year, Hollywood pumps out several vigilante thrill-rides, and with The Brave One and Death Sentence now in theaters, 2007 is no exception.

In recent years, the bar has risen for revenge films. Although straight revenge yarns haven’t gone away (Lucky Number Slevin, The Punisher), some of the industry’s best filmmakers have been adding a significant degree of dimensionality, style and substance to the genre. The last five years alone have seen the likes of Mendes, Spielberg, the Wachowskis, Nolan and Tarantino toiling in the genre, and the results have been nothing less then excellent (Road to Perdition, Munich, V for Vendetta, Batman Begins, Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2).

Inspired, perhaps, by the recent surge in thought-provoking, character-driven vigilantism on film, The Brave One and Death Sentence both attempt to dig deep and deliver social commentaries about violence and the costs that come with revenge. However, in an attempt to have it both ways—to deliver kick-ass, cheer-worthy action, along with remorseful reflection—each film falters tonally, muddying up the end results.

In The Brave One, Jodie Foster plays Erica, a New York City radio talk show host whose perfect life is thrown into disarray when three thugs attack her and her fiancé David (Lost’s Naveen Andrews), leaving him dead and her in the hospital for three weeks. Although physically alive, Erica is emotionally destroyed. As her on-the-point narration indicates, she has embraced the stranger within (a nice motif that I enjoyed much more when served through the lyrical stylings of Billy Joel).

Per genre demands, Erica begins to exact vigilante justice on random do-badders, and thus attracts the attention of the police, led by sensitive Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) and his wisecracking partner Vitale (a pitch-perfect Nicky Katt). Simultaneously, Erica cultivates an odd friendship with Mercer, who, piece by piece, begins to realize she may be the vigilante he is tracking down.

Tech aspects are great, and Neil Jordan, the consummate pro he is, brings his A-game to the director’s chair. Additionally, the cast is uniformly excellent. Foster does a great job of towing the line between insanity and rationality, showing that Erica has doubts that her brand of justice is right, while also hinting that she has become somewhat addicted to it. Meanwhile, Howard goes above the call of duty. His scenes with Foster are a masterstroke in cat-and-mouse proceedings.

Despite these positives, the screenwriters have totally dropped the ball. The less said about the ending the better, because it’s one of those Hollywood tack-ons that aren’t really earned as much as demanded by stupid test audiences and eager-to-please executives. Any sort of message that the first three quarters of the movie seemed to strive for is totally thrown out the window in the tonally inferior finale.

Also bothersome, albeit less so, is the fact that Erica doesn’t get around to exacting her own revenge until late in the proceedings once it becomes convenient for the scattershot screenplay. Most of her “revenge” is taken against a series of random evil sons-of-guns, whom she continues to run into throughout the film in increasingly comedic fashion. And through it all, the script tries too damn hard to take all accountability off of the character, only showing her taking revenge once she has, herself, been assaulted (one scene, in particular, is downright hilarious in this regard).

Nonetheless, Foster and Howard’s deft performances make The Brave One worth the price of admission. Their interplay alone helps save the film from itself, at least for a little while, until it base jumps off a cliff.

In comparison to The Brave One, Death Sentence is a B-movie effort. While the former film had an Oscar-winning director and two-time Oscar-winning star, Death Sentence offers Saw’s James Wan and Kevin Bacon (no offense to the Bacon, who can often character-act with the best of them). Still, while Death Sentence predictably proves to be the weaker film, it does do a better job at pleasing the genre’s core audience.

The film focuses on Nick Hume (Bacon), whose ideal home life is disrupted when his golden-boy son Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) is killed as part of a gang initiation right in front of his eyes. This provides Nick, along with his wife (Kelly Preston) and younger, less-loved son (Jordann Garrett), with a whole lot of anguish.

After a hard-to-believe line of circumstances leads Nick to conclude that the punk, Joe Darley (Matt O’Leary), who killed his son will get off with a comparatively light sentence despite the fact that he saw him do it, Nick recants his testimony. Soon after Joe is released, Nick exacts fatal revenge, starting a war between himself and the gang.

Interestingly, the film takes a hard look at the perils of revenge, pulling few punches in its depiction of the results of vengeance. However, such aims at social commentary are out of the film’s grasp, and so it quickly falls back on visceral thrills and genre clichés that border on self-parody (see: horrendous police stupidity and montage scene editing).

To his credit, Bacon shows great commitment, giving the film an unfaltering center around which to gravitate. Although it might seem like a paycheck job, Bacon’s conviction is as evident here as it was in Mystic River and The Woodsman. There’s also some nice gory stuff for genre enthusiasts, as well as a respectful homage to Taxi Driver.

In the end, the film falls apart because the script and the filmmaker seem to lack the capacity to carry through on deeper themes of the piece. Still, the tone stays relatively consistent, and the film should please genre fans, especially once it hits home video.

viscof1@lasalle.edu