Last week the British public seemingly made heroes out of some criminals on an estate who decided that they would beat up some other criminals for selling drugs so it makes sense that I should spend an afternoon watching the vigilante lovin’ double-bill of The Brave One and Death Sentence.
The former stars Jodie Foster as a radio presenter who buys a gun following a vicious assault that leaves her comatose and her fiancé dead. Of course it is not long before she uses the weapon, firstly in self-defence then in a slightly more proactive manner.
The Brave One likes to pretend that it is asking questions about the trauma of violence, revenge versus justice, the importance of the law and so on but, in reality, it is using this faux-liberal posturing as a cover for the same old conservative Hollywood values. It bemoans the brutalization of the protagonist’s beloved New York and yet is complicit in her slaughter. Foreign looking types commit senseless graphic violence whilst our heroine’s executions are framed in action-movie dynamics – you could say that as an analogy of recent U.S. history the director (Neil Jordan – yeah I know) has hit the nail on the head but, like the U.S., one gets the impression that he is simply trying to have his cake and eat it.
The one glimmer of hope comes in the form of Terence Howard’s Detective Mercer. His views on the necessity of law do give the film some balance but, unfortunately, any such pretensions are ripped away by a final act that gives us a convenient resolution and effectively passes her vigilante murders off as a form of therapy, a blood stained counselling session – again the parallels are acute and so is the idiocy. This stands in stark contrast to the second half of the double bill…
Death Sentence features Kevin Bacon as a father who loses his son to a violent gang initiation. As ever in films like this the law fails him and he is driven to dishing out his own ‘justice’. Unfortunately for him Death Sentence, despite its pop video aesthetic, happens in more realistic world than The Brave One. In Death Sentence violence does not cure anything, it simply comes back to you as seen in the transformation of the mild-mannered family man into a shaven headed, broken and bloodied criminal who is indistinguishable from his nemesis.
Make no mistake, Death Sentence is graphic violence for the sake of entertainment but, unlike The Brave One, it does not pretend to be anything else and at least has the good grace to admit that violence is what it is and can’t just be picked up then dropped whenever it suits.
Death Sentence is available now on DVD. trailer
The Brave One is released on DVD on 11th Feb 2008 trailer
Foster did a pretty good job in Brave One… a good demonstration of the power of fear; it felt like the detective compromised his convictions at the end, tho, kind of a let down