Dir: Neil Jordan. US. 2007. 122 mins.
Jodie Foster delivers a performance far superior to her material in Neil Jordan's self-consciously provocative and largely absurd vigilante drama - which has its world premiere as a Special Presentation in Toronto. Attempting to hit the same hot buttons as other audacious studio movies like Falling Down or Foster's 20 year-old The Accused, it starts well but falls down fast as its plot becomes far-fetched and then spirals into the ethically dubious action genre associated with its producer Joel Silver.

Foster's name has proved one of the most consistently bankable in the business, especially in thrillers which she carries single-handedly like Flightplan and Panic Room which both took more than $200m worldwide. Warner Bros will be banking principally on her name and the sensational revenge elements to build the film's standing with audiences. Critics will be mixed to indifferent and it will be hard-pressed to last through awards season, although Foster has an outside chance at bagging her fifth Oscar nomination for her compelling work here.

The contrivances of the plot begin immediately. Foster is Erica Bain, a radio show host who delivers eloquent on-air monologues about her beloved New York City when not recording sounds from the streets or preparing her wedding invitations to David Kirmani (Andrews), with whom she is shown to be so ridiciulously happy (her friend Jane Adams even declares how happy she is) that it is only a matter of time before something bad happens.

Which it does when she and David walk their dog in Central Park one night, hardly the safest of activities in the first place. Sure enough, three hoods attack them in a tunnel and beat them senseless, killing David and leaving Erica in a virtual coma.

She recovers and attempts to return to her day-to-day life but is stricken by fear until one day she makes a decision to buy a firearm, which she does illegally from a man on the street.

While shopping in a grocery store one night, Foster witnesses the murder of the cashier by her crazed husband and shoots him dead when he attempts to kill her. Before long, she is using her gun on all sorts of bad seeds - knocking off a couple of hoodlums in a subway, whacking the abusive john of a hapless prostitute, even beating to death a crooked businessman whom the police, represented by Terrence Howard (coincidentally the detective on all her crimes), cannot nail.

When the police detain one of her assailants, she embarks on her final rampage, determined to wreak her revenge on the three thugs who changed her life.

Jordan attempts to explore the moral ambiguity of maverick justice, touching on the quandary of capital punlshment here and there, and Foster, whose face is repeatedly shown in exposing close-up, does her valiant best to make Erica's character arc plausible. Ultimately, however, genre conventions win out. The violence inflicted on our questionable heroine and her fiance is far more shockingly depicted than the random slaughter she herself carries out. And in the end, she gets away with multiple murder, while possibly finding new romance with her good guy cop. Only in a Joel Silver movie.

Production companies
Silver Pictures
Warner Bros Pictures
Village Roadshow Pictures

US distribution
Warner Bros
International distribution
WBPI/Village Roadshow Pictures

Executive producers
Herbert W Gains
Jodie Foster
Dana Goldberg
Bruce Berman

Producers
Joel Silver
Susan Downey

Screenplay
Roderick Taylor
Bruce A Taylor
Cynthia Mort
From a story by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A Taylor

Director of photography
Philippe Rousselot

Production designer
Kristi Zea

Editor
Tony Lawson

Music
Dario Marianelli

Main cast
Jodie Foster
Terrence Howard
Naveen Andrews
Nicky Katt
Mary Steenburgen

Topics