Reel Politique: Coming Attractions, Vigilante Films
Don’t go into park tunnels in Manhattan if you can help it.
That’s the message of many a NY film, be it Cruising, Birth, or Narc (which yes, I know, is set in Detroit, but still, it’s a tunnel). That’s what happens to radio personality Erica Bain (Jodi Foster) in the forthcoming The Brave One. While walking her dog in the park one night with her fiance, she enters the tunnel, is raped by hoodlums, and the boyfriend is killed. In the aftermath, the justice system is helpless, whereupon she turns into a vengeance machine. It sounds like the brilliant Ms. 45 only without the sexy lethal nun costume. In fact, from the trailer, it seems to be a direct, unofficial remake of Death Wish. The Brave One is directed by Neil Jordan, the Irish helmer who strides both the art house and the popular cinema.
(As a side note, among films about the unpleasant subject of rape, I would highly recommend Outrage, the 1950 film directed by Ida Lupino.)
The Brave One almost starred Nicole Kidman, but she dropped that project in favor of The Invasion, the forthcoming (and fourth) remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and this is not the first time Miss Foster has inherited a project from Miss Kidman — see Panic Room).
But what’s curious about The Brave One is that it isn’t the only vigilante film about to come out featuring a surprisingly unlikely actor at the center. Death Sentence stars Kevin Bacon as a man whose family suffers at the hands of a gang, and when the legal system can do nothing about it, he takes the law into his own hands, becoming as much an animal as his prey. Directed by James Wan (one of the creators behind the Saw series), Death Sentence is based on a novel by Brian Garfield, the man who really wrote the original source novel for Death Wish, so in a way this film can be viewed as a slightly more official sequel to the Charles Bronson hit.
Kidman, Foster, and Bacon all seem like hippy dippy anti-violence types unlikely to associate themselves with cheap-thrills genres, so why would they sign up for a movie that requires them to shoot off faces and bash in brains — unless in the final analysis they actually turn out to be anti-violence films? In any case, we will know soon enough. Death Sentence comes out August 31, and The Brave One September 14.