Foster makes 'Brave' look good

We've seen this movie before.

Only we haven't seen Jodie Foster do it.

Foster is the main reason to catch "The Brave One," an exploration of themes well-traversed by Charles Bronson in the "Death Wish" series that began more than 30 years ago.

Here she plays Erica Bain, who reads her own essays on air at an NYC radio station. (How this gig could be enough to pay the bills I don't know, but then movie Manhattan is a far more affordable town than the real one.) Erica has a Public Radio voice - calm, thoughtful, carefully measured, with little hint of emotion in her perfectly rounded vowels.

Then comes the night that she and her fiance ("Lost's" Naveen Andrews) are attacked in Central Park by a gang of young thugs. Erica awakens from a coma weeks later to learn that her love is dead and buried. And despite the reassurances of the cops that they're on the case, it seems like nothing really is being done. Just as bad, the city she has always loved now seems a terribly hostile environment.

One can hardly blame her for wanting to arm herself, although perhaps she should have waited for a permit so she could obtain legal protection. Instead she buys a big honking automatic pistol and a box of bullets from a guy hanging around outside the gun store. And once she's got an arsenal in her purse, it's only a matter of time before she uses it.

Fate provides her first victim, a crazed gunman in an all-night grocery where Erica shops. In self-defense she blows away the creep and then hightails it, leaving a couple of New York's finest (Terrence Howard, Nicky Katt) to figure out what happened from the bloody evidence left behind.

Vigilantism feels so good that pretty soon Erica is trolling the park and subway, just hoping for some deviant to make her day.

As the bodies pile up, all struck down by bullets from just one gun, Howard's cop begins to get suspicious. But he also empathizes with Erica's loss - maybe enough to let her keep on doing what she's obviously so effective at doing.

Like all movies in the "Death Wish" mold, "The Brave One" wants to provide the cathartic release of vigilante justice while arguing that it's wrong to take the law into our own hands.

Thanks to the crisp direction of Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game," "Michael Collins") and Foster's slowly simmering performance, this nonsense keeps our interest longer than it really should.

But eventually we wake up. This is really just another "Ms. .45" revenge flick, only with artistic pretensions.

The question is whether that makes "The Brave One" better or badder than pure unadulterated exploitation.