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* Though I am generally loath to include them, this review contains plot points and spoilers *

Neil Jordan’s take on the vigilante drama The Brave One starts off strong. We’re introduced to the title character Erica Bane (Jodie Foster), the host of a radio show called “Street Walk”. (You’re forgiven if your mind leaps to Taxi Driver: same menacing city, same legendary actress but as a prostitute). The credits play over beautiful and dense images of the city and Erica’s workplace. Erica’s popular faux profundities in essay form, channeled through Jodie’s distinctive vocal character, are a pleasant and involving opening to the movie. You immediately buy the actress as a famous radio voice and the familiarity of her (I’d forgotten how distinctive Foster’s voice is) lulls you into a peaceful state. All the better to cast you into hell when the time comes. If you’re not living under a rock in the day and age of mass marketing, you already know that the movie won’t be rocking you to sleep thereafter. It’ll play more like a nightmare.

So far so good.

The movie doesn’t waste much time establishing Erica’s happy pre-attack life. She has a easy rapport with her boss (Mary Steenburgen), a close friend she sees regularly (Jane Adams), and is head over heels in love with her fiancé (Naveen Andrews), and both of them love their dog. It’s all painted in facile broad strokes but it works. One night in a walk through Central Park, though, their happy life is destroyed. The dog goes missing, the fiancé is murdered and Erica nearly so. She wakes up, like Uma Thurman’s Bride, to the irreversible truth a long while later in a hospital room.

Understandably Erica is racked by grief and confusion. She goes a little nuts and Foster expertly conveys the radio host's increasing bewilderment and frustration. She’s scared to leave her house. The city she once loved feels menacing and unfamiliar. She starts smoking, ignores her friends, stays away from work, thinks incessantly about the murder.

Since The Brave One springs from a well-worn movie template you know immediately where it’s going. Erica will get her ass out of that apartment and she’ll get violent with the men who destroyed her life. But, given the heady team assembled to tell the story, and the tone of the material thus far, one assumes that the drama will come from a rather atypical place: neither the destination nor the journey but the interior. How will this Brave One feel about herself along the way?

Erica leaves her apartment. You knew she would and, honestly, you’re glad for it as a moviegoer:  you want to see her go a little off the rails. Who wouldn’t? Her descent into a life of a crime is pointedly easy (broad strokes again) as she acquires an illegal gun and almost immediately needs to use it in self-defense. The scene in question is tense, but a sinking feeling sets in. Erica is going off the rails… but this movie doesn’t have the control or the smarts to challenge her decision making. It won't do anything but follow her dumbly down her preordained path.

Following this, her first vigilante act of violence, the movie starts hemorhagging IQ points: the coincidences pile up, the bodies pile up and silly hand wringing escalates. The latter piece, which the movie clearly intends to be its claim to fame artistically, is almost laughable in its total lack of conviction and complexity. For you see, the deck is always stacked in favor of the violence. In all but one case in the movie, Erica is in kill-or-be-killed situations. Even a pacifist might shoot first in these situations.

The Brave One is essentially an uncomplex story about a woman who wants to kill bad guys: a superhero who is more willing than usual to fight to the death. Kill Bill, a recent female driven revenge drama, was derided by some as a cartoon but it had more ambiguous feeling in virtually every bloody scene. There’s nothing in Erica’s descent into violent crime, for example, that’s even a tenth as unnerving or honest as that startling/sick moment when The Bride addresses a 4-year-old girl whose mother she has just murdered “if you’re still feeling a little raw about this…” None of Erica Bane’s targets have so much as a hint of an interior life. They have only violence to offer the world. You’re free to cheer when they leave it.

There’s one signpost line somewhere in the middle of the film from a drugged up girl who Erica is intent on saving. Peering out from under doped up eyes the girl asks the vigilante “is this still America?”  If you're not groaning you might be willing to grant the movie some artistic license there. If this is, in fact, an allegory for America it's an interesting if depressing movie. I suppose one could read it as an elaborate satire of American hypocrisy and bloodlust: we pride ourselves on being a great civilized nation, but entertainments such as this one suggests that a bloody lawless society is a more accurate picture of our ideas about justice. Or maybe Erica Bane is meant to reflect America's current self-conflict: eager to go to war but all guilt ridden once the death toll rises. But more likely, what we’re watching is not a satire of America but a cynical shell game. The Brave One ropes the more sensitive viewers in with its emotional “what’s happening to me?” notes and then serves up the very traditional violent denouement the genre fans will be asking for.

For all its lip service to the merits of abiding by the law (embodied by a sympathetic cop, Terrence Howard, who befriends Erica) , for all its hand wringing about violent retribution (mostly embodied by the vigilante herself, in voiceover), The Brave One reveals a hawkish soul. In the last set-piece and quiet finish its bloodlust is crystal clear, its cynicism complete. The movie has been shamelessly exploiting the last several years of American paranoia (radiating from collective New York fantasies) in the service of a morally reprehensible and utterly typical revenge fantasy. It’d be easier to respect the film if it didn’t pretend to be something other than a movie built for tawdry violent thrills (and they are there, I suspect you're looking at a sizeable box office hit)  But even up until its last moment The Brave One never stops lying to itself or the audience. It ends on a scripted note of despair, another voiceover from Erica Bane about how she has become a stranger to herself and nothing will ever be the same. But this too is a lie. Its final image and plot points contradict that. Erica has removed the bad guys from the world and her life, has gotten away with murder, and she walks peaceably through the park. The final joke: she's even reunited with her dog.

Though it pretends otherwise, the film fully and enthusiastically supports Erica's violent mission, refusing to complicate it with significant obstacles or lose/lose moral conundrums. Hawks may love it, doves may be fooled by it, but The Brave One is a movie that's only pretending to be at war with itself. I’m sorry to report that it lets its inner bad guy win.