Rating: 3/5
Meditation on total loss — loss of the city of your childhood, the loss of your loved ones, the loss of hope that anything that can change
Erica (Jodie Foster) and her partner David (Naveen Andrews) go out for a walk. Thugs take their dog, beat up Erica so badly that she ends up in a coma for three weeks, and beat David to death
The police are present but are cold and not helpful. To feel safe, Foster buys a gun illegally. But when a confrontation forces her to use it she decides to put herself in a vigilante role
Detective Mercer (Terrance Howard) is the “good” cop that gives Erica hope, but not enough to give up killing baddies. He’s also investigating her shootings and is most likely to catch her. This is one of his better performances — he and Jodie Foster have good onscreen chemistry
The movie suffers from saccharine sentimentality — flashbacks set to Sarah McLachlan-adjacent music, dialogue meant to have weight but just read as cheesy, and a lot of police procedural cliches
Thankfully, Jodie Foster finds a human being in her character, raising the movie above your standard revenge exploitation flick. She has some lame monologues/narration, but she makes them sound sincere. Her performance is what makes this movie good
No joke, I cheered in the finale. It’s not good, but they made it work for me