Another that I’d been looking forward to for a long time – in this case, I’m pretty sure damn near a year since it was announced? But here the disappointment was even more tremendous. This looked so great as the trailer and clips started coming out … and I can’t believe that I’m saying this but to me it seems it all comes down to Harold Pinter’s adaptation. It feels so much like somebody felt that the play had to be really adapted for the screen, that it had to be made cinematic etc. This would’ve been fine had it not been done before, and proven then that there was no need – the more theatrical the 1972 movie gets, the more fun it is.

Caine and Law are both fine as expected, though neither approach their best work so even to suggest it’s worth watching “just for them” would be misleading. The production design, all that slick blue, was one of the many things that looked wonderful in the trailers but even over the brief 90 minute running time it gets a little tired. The whole thing is just so drab – there’s but one spark of the original’s merriment when Law rips off his disguise, his hair straggled out, I’m sure deliberately to resemble Caine in the same moment of the original. If you’ve not seen the original yet and are considering this, spare yourself the extra time and do yourself a favour by going straight to the classic.

What a double treat this and Twisted Nerve have been This again bears a (very Vertigo-ish) Bernard Herrmann score (made even harder not to make the comparison by the waves crashing over the opening credits) and it’s from an Agatha Christie source, the next best thing in the thriller genre to Hitchcock. I’ve been planning on seeing this ever since I got it, of course, for Hayley Mills, but holding off because I’m not great with Agatha Christie stuff (funnily enough the first IMDb comment I came across said “not so great if you’re an Agatha Christie fan”). This isn’t Poirot or Miss Marple or anything, though, it’s a very self-contained stripped down story that surely must’ve passed through the hands of Hitch at some point – like Twisted Nerve, it would’ve been wonderful with him in charge, but even without him it holds some interest.

Hywel Bennett stars with Mills again (the second of a triple these past few days) and they’re a great pairing. I cringed the moment Mills’ character announced herself as American, but I have to say, I almost want to take back all I’ve said against Hayley and her accents, ‘cos the one she uses here isn’t half bad. She’s ludicrously beautiful again as she was in Twisted Nerve ... between the two I honestly feel like I’m falling in love with her all over again. Add the shots of the Vespa and the mini and the hard to believe moment where Mills says she’s never tried a muffin, lol, and this is certainly one I’ll watch again.

This one is interesting for a lot of reasons – Tarantino fans will get excited as soon as the opening credits start up (that theme will be in my head for days, it’s one that’s always catchy and never tires; made even more memorable by the character it represents here; could do without the slaughtered “jazz” version, though, lol), and Hayley Mills is ridiculously gorgeous.

It’s very risqué for its time (not to mention for a Hayley Mills film gasp) while at the same time giving its age away with phenomenally narrow-minded generalisations. At 2 hours it’s way overlong. Hitchcock would’ve had much more fun with it, and it’s a massive shame he didn’t. For a Hayley Mills fan, though, it’s a similar kind of gem as I found Far From Home as a Drew Barrymore fan. I’ve been reading the novel of Marnie recently and in trying to find a different, more British voice for Marnie in my head I found myself settling on Hayley Mills and ultimately thinking how great it would’ve been not only to see her in that movie, but in any Hitchcock movie … so, especially with the Bernard Herrmann music, this is about the best consolation prize you could hope for and personally, I loved it.

Though I’ve really loved a few of Neil Jordan’s movies – The End of the Affair in particular, Interview with the Vampire of course … looking at his filmography now I realise I’ve actually missed quite a few, lol – I really came to this expecting nothing more than the latest perfect Jodie Foster performance. This used to be an event, of course, in the decade leading up to Panic Room a Jodie movie was really a Jodie Movie. Now, she almost religiously gets Oscar buzz on a yearly basis (no luck yet), and like Dakota Fanning, Johnny Depp – I’m sure there are others – more often than not, the greatness of the performance is almost “boringly” so.

But this performance honestly surprised me. Foster is known for playing strong women, of course, and her roles have almost without exception always had something powerful to say about women, about the treatment, the history, the everything of women. It’s almost bizarre to find her in this movie once you find out what kind of movie it is. I read recently about how upset she’d been by Sin City and I totally got where she was coming from, but there are many ways in which The Brave One is not so different from that comic book burst of ultraviolence. What makes Foster’s performance so surprising is the weakness she manages to show us at times. It’s a revenge movie, so of course there’s still a lot of strength. It’s called The Brave One, d’uh. But it’s the other, quieter stuff – the way she approaches the police desk after first getting the courage to leave her apartment at the start, for instance – that really made an impression on me.

There are moments here where I had to actually double check that it wasn’t based on a graphic novel or comic, in fact – the moment, for instance, where her “voiceover” first creeps in as she leaves the subway, “Why aren’t my hands shaking? Why does nobody stop me?” It practically reminded me of an old Incredible Hulk cartoon I used to watch on a loop, “Dizzy, shaky. Unable … to … stand …” It’s almost like she’s literally transforming superhero style into this other person she is in the end (“Superc*nt” – no don’t close the window, that’s the movie’s word, not mine – would almost be the perfect title, in fact). But though I’d struggle to say the movie is necessarily dark – on the contrary, it revels in its near-schlockiness just about wherever it possibly can – it’s certainly more interested in showing how affected – and, ultimately, irredeemably destroyed – Foster’s character is by every act of violence. And that’s the giant hairline than separates it from the far less reverent Sin City.

Anyway, like I said, I was amazed to find it really wasn’t just the Jodie that thrilled me in this movie. It’s every bit as absorbingly intense emotionally as I found The End of the Affair. It’s one of those movies that just fired its harpoon of interest directly into the center of my forehead and never let me go. At almost 2 hours in length, that’s really no mean feat. There’s just so much here that can only improve on subsequent viewings. There are so many things that really shouldn’t work, so many conveniences and contrivances – quite literally, the shooting in the convenience store, then the trust Foster shows following a stranger into a back alley to get a gun – but they’re all smoothed over effortlessly by what I can only assume is a Disbelief Suspension Device that Jodie Foster has concealed somewhere on her person at all times on set.

My mum said afterwards how Foster looks much as she did in The Accused. I said, yeh, and I’m sure that’s how a lot of people, possibly even Jodie, hoped that movie would end. It’s basically that movie meets Taxi Driver, Iris all grown up and doing the Travis Bickle thing – with the prostitute in the taxi, it’s almost a direct lift. It honestly amazes me that I haven’t heard more people going crazy about how basically dangerous this movie is etc, like Daily Mail types who said David Cronenberg’s Crash was gonna bring down society etc. This in itself probably says more than the movie itself does about how much morals have crumbled in just a decade. Even I found myself during this movie, even as I was quietly cheering Jodie on, thinking, “but … dude!” But what finally made me love this movie the most is how it genuinely takes no prisoners. It goes all the way, right or wrong. It delivers, which is more than can be said of at least 80% of the movies I’ve seen this year.