If there's any redeeming quality to The Brave One, it's Foster herself, always a mesmerizing presence even in the most ridiculous movies - she lends the same level of nuance to characters regardless of the script they're in. And what happened to Curtis? Apparently, lazy director Neil Jordan (who did movies like The Butcher Boy and The End of the Affair back when wit and coherence were higher on his priority list) doesn't care: the dog is really only ever used as a plot device, and an awkward one at that. Poor David the Fiance ends up beaten to death Erica wakes up from a coma three weeks later to discover David has already been buried. And that's where some apparently Mexican thugs, smoking and drinking whiskey just to make sure we know they're bad people, come out of nowhere and beat the shit out of Eric and her boyfriend, for no discernible reason. Erica Bain and her dashing young fiancé ( Lost's Naveen Andrews) go for a late night walk in Central Park, where, in their apparent youthful infatuation with each other, they fail to keep their hands on Curtis's leash.Ĭurtis, naturally, heads straight for a creepy shadowy underpass where no other people seem to be around.

Solid defense, that.Īnyway, back to Curtis, without whom the plot to The Brave One could never have been so trite and predictable. One would be challenged to find any other film with a more inappropriate title - even Jodie Foster herself decried it in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview: 'My only defense is that there are a lot of really good movies that have bad titles,' she says. Poor Curtis! The apparently schizophrenic (running away from Mommy one moment running toward her the next) German Shepherd gets no love in The Brave One, a preposterous movie with an even more preposterous title.

None of this crap would have happened to victimized radio personality Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) if she's just been a better dog mommy.

Erica the brave one