Thou Shalt Not Kill... Even If You're Jodie Foster

Thou Shalt Not Kill... Even If You're Jodie Foster

Posted on Monday October 1, 2007, 16:07 by Dan Jolin in Empire States

Warning: minor plot spoilers ahead…

There’s a very good reason why Michael Winner’s Parting Shots is perched at the top of my list of worst films ever made. Well, there are MANY very good reasons (I’ll list them for anyone who asks), but above all the film’s extreme technical indelicacies is its purely, deeply, truly, madly offensive right-wing proposition that the actions of a murderous vigilante (in this case a photographer diagnosed with cancer who decides to kill everyone he blames for screwing up his life – played by, *cough*, Chris Rea) are not only justifiable, but heroic. Even more galling, it adds the erroneous suggestion that we all secretly would like to do what Rea’s character’s doing. (Winner, of course, has snuffled around this odious territory before in Death Wish and Dirty Weekend, so by Parting Shots – fittingly his last film – he’d pretty much honed all his worst tendencies.)

I bring this up now, because last week saw the release of The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster as a woman who, after being beaten to a pulp and witnessing her fiancé’s death at the hands of some New York City thugs, buys a gun and starts shooting criminals. As you do. Despite exhibiting rather more craftsmanship than Winner’s dog’s dinner, Neil Jordan’s vigilante picture stuck very close to Parting Shots in my craw. At first I thought it’d want to have its liberal cake and eat it (Foster’s character starts out as an intellectual media type and the film does try to posit some kind of moral conundrum during its second act), but then it just gives up, venomously spitting said cake all over any civilized sense of justice.

Of course, someone who believes you should be allowed to get away with murder so long as the deceased possibly deserved it – meaning anyone who’s in favour of the death penalty, basically – will very likely enjoy The Brave One. Which leads me to wonder if it’s possible, or desirable, to disassociate yourself from your political views when watching a film – in particular a vigilante movie.

Perhaps if The Brave One had made any attempt at ambiguity come its ham-fisted climax, I’d have treated it as a thoughtful exploration of the madness of modern society and stroked my beardy chin. Perhaps if it had just been ludicrous and over the top, I’d have lumped it in with The Punisher and forgotten about it two nanoseconds later. (Quick note: I’m not counting superhero movies as vigilante movies – most costumed crusaders are concerned only with stopping bad-doers, not killing them stone dead.) But it did neither. Unlike Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, Foster’s Erica Bain is given a vengeance motive (ie something to conveniently sympathise with), and her rampage is presented as a (perverse) healing process – Travis, by contrast, is a man disintegrating, whose treatment as a hero at the end is intended as an ironic statement. I couldn’t detect any irony in The Brave One.

So there you go. I just can’t ignore my mad, lefty view that no one, no matter how screwed up they’ve been by terrible personal events, no matter how anti-social their quarry, no matter how genuinely they think they’re doing good, should be morally absolved of their decision to execute people. And a film which suggests otherwise deserves nothing but derision.