This movie was terrible!
When the trailer for The Brave One surfaced a few months back I sat up and took notice. Jody Foster. Cool. Hey! - wait a minute! Isn’t this Death Wish? They’re re-making Death Wish with Jody Foster?!
Then the title of the film came up. And it wasn’t Death Wish. What?!
I immediately came home and went online to see what others were saying about this trailer and sure enough - I wasn’t imagining things. Others had caught on to the blatant Death Wish resemblance.
All right, I thought, I’ve hated the idea of re-makes since they recently became fashionable in
What bothered me more an anything though is that the ad campaign and the studio was making no reference to Death Wish. I read entire articles and interviews with the cast and crew that gave no mention of the films source material. Did they think that most people had never heard of Charles Bronson’s most famous film? Especially since, as Rob Zombie recently stated in defense of his Halloween re-make, people are hyper-sensitive as to what’s out there because of the internet and DVD. Nice try folks!
Now on to the film!
We start with the script. Horrible. The dialogue was stilted and un-relatable. The situations were ludicrous. And the performances were not up to standard. Adding the “poetic” spoken-word-radio-show-stuff made the whole thing laughable. They should have just played it as a B-movie - then all of the aforementioned would have worked in its favor.
And, as has been mentioned in other reviews, the casting was all wrong. There was absolutely no chemistry between Jody Foster and Naveen Andrews – a chemistry that was absolutely vital to this particular kind of film.
Although extremely flawed as well, James Wan’s Death Sentence (which came out a few weeks prior) was a more welcome addition to the vigilante/revenge genre.
Bottom line: It just didn’t work.
