'The Brave One' fires blanks

Vigilante movies tend to be right-wing endeavors, in which gun-toting individualists take the law into their own hands after being let down by a bureaucratic society intent on coddling criminals.

With "The Brave One," Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan shift the genre to the murky left, where right and wrong are not so black and white. In doing so, they have taken away the very thing that makes a vigilante movie work.

Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio reporter who builds stories by walking around New York and recording the sounds. She speaks in hushed, NPR-style whispers about the crime and grime that is disappearing from the safest big city in the world.

While walking through a park with her fiance (Naveen Andrews), she comes face to face with the type of crime she has been nostalgic for: In a brutal mugging, she is badly beaten and her fiance is killed.

After a slow recovery she decides she needs a gun and needs it now, eschewing a permit for an illegal piece. Her descent into vigilante justice begins in a convenience store, where she kills a man in self-defense and takes the surveillance camera evidence. Her spree continues on a subway train when she shoots two young men who threaten to rape her.

Meanwhile, a cop (Terrence Howard) starts to put the pieces together.

Coincidences run rampant in the script, making New York feel like a small town. As the story moves along, her crimes become more absurd and the drama falls apart. "The Brave One" wants to question the whole vigilante genre, but it works better in theory than in execution, so to speak.