The Brave One (Neil Jordan): Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Nicky Katt, Naveen Andrews.

Running time: 119 minutes.

NEIL Jordan's new film The Brave One stars Jodie Foster as Erica Bain, a tousle-haired radio presenter who swaps her microphone for a 9mm handgun. By day, she narrates stories on air, cast in shades of noir, about her beloved New York. By night, she prowls its mean streets in a tight-fit leather jacket . . . dispensing justice vigilante style. She is determined to slay the gang members who put her in a coma and her fiance in a coffin; but anyone else vaguely nasty who comes her way will do.

She rescues a young prostitute held captive in the back of a car by a perverse kerb-crawler, and then blows a hole in the man's head. You could be forgiven for thinking she was avenging ghosts of her past . . . the child prostitute Foster played in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in 1976.

But Erica has no issues from a troubled childhood. She is just a cosy middle-class woman who took her security for granted.

We know this when, on a dark night at the start of the film, she walks with her beau David (Naveen Andrews) through a Central Park entrance called "Strangers Gate". They then follow their dog into a dark underpass from where it barks but doesn't emerge. Damn it, does this woman not watch the movies? Their silly complacency is snuffed out in an instant: they are mugged, beaten and left for dead.

Still, there are moments when you forget you are watching a genre film: Jordan's montage of doctors slicing clothes off the couple's shattered bodies in the emergency room, mirrored with alternating images of the lovers sliding clothes off each other: a stark contrast of fate. Erica's sense of security has now been stripped too; she fears the city.

And The Brave One in some ways is about this fear. The shattered lovers' tranquillity recalls the moment in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat when Glenn Ford's wife is blown up in a car bomb outside their suburban home. When his Detective Bannion goes on the rampage, burning up the city with his rage, he is not out just to avenge his wife, but also to staunch the crime that has leaked beyond city limits into the safe haven of the 'burbs.

For Erica, this refuge that has been destroyed is a place partly in her mind. The camera becomes infected with paranoia: alert, ever-watchful, it tunes in to her emotional disturbance. The police are helpful but uninterested. "Yeah, you're the good guys. How come it doesn't feel like that?" she says. Foster transforms expertly to nervy victim. She craves a gun. When she tells a gunstore owner she will not survive another 30 days, it is because she knows the script demands a confrontation with a gun-wielding psycho in a drugstore and she will be required to blast him across the aisle.

It's a curious scene: again, it recalls Taxi Driver . . . Travis Bickle had his own similar moment. But where Scorsese transformed the neon steam of New York into a moral haze, Jordan unmoors his moody control and steers a course for black and white genre. It becomes a cat and mouse procedural involving Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard).

Howard's sensitivity makes him seem almost ineffective . . . which is probably the point. But he is a firm believer in justice. By chance, he gets to know Erica, gets to like her. And he then comes to suspect her.

"Inside you, there is a stranger, " Erica tells us, and the film addresses this idea of the monster within all of us. But when the gun smoke and the heat clears, there is a need to address what exactly is being said. For the film offers an extraordinary realigning of the moral order that made me queasy. Historically, vigilante films such as Dirty Harry and its successors like Death Wish zeitgeisted a fear of a crumbling social order. But The Brave One is so rooted in a sense of place, it is impossible to ignore its connotations with 9/11 New York. Its ghosts haunt the film.

It reinforces a victim culture and an acceptance of brute force where justice is perceived as slow and ineffective. It reads like justification for post-9/11 policy.

Five years ago, this might have been in tune with the way many felt. Today, if the recent past has taught us anything, we know that lashing out against the world only brings more trouble.

In 1971, Pauline Kael famously labelled Dirty Harry's vigilantism as fascistic. But Detective Callahan threw in his badge out of disgust at the way city corruption had forced him to act so brutally. The Brave One accepts Erica's need for vengeance but doesn't allow her to transform because of it. It unshackles this responsibility onto the police force which does something despicable. There is an unnerving shot of Erica running away amongst her own shadows . . . haunted by demons. But she has not learned anything from her violent spree, while we have learned that rough justice not only is justified, but has the backing of the establishment.

And that is a certain kind of fascism.