All it takes is a hammer and a few hours. If a man sold his own suicide to benefit his family, would he not face a crisis over whether death might hurt his loved ones more than poverty ever could? Not in “The Brave,” where basic human emotions stand little chance against the script’s labored contrivances.Īmong these, the most hootable comes when Raphael, hoping to give his family some memorable gifts before his rendezvous with the Reaper, constructs a rustic theme park outside their home.

As is, the viewer’s best guess will have to suffice.Įven given the premise’s waftiness, little is done to develop it in logical dramatic ways. Preliminary production reports suggested a snuff film as the reason for McCarthy’s deadly deal. Though Brando’s work in this key scene is entirely credible, his windy philosophizing about death seems an unintended parody of his soliloquies in “Last Tango in Paris.” Pic’s dialogue generally tends toward the half-baked.

Promising work, Larry sends him to a mysterious figure named McCarthy (Marlon Brando), who meets Raphael in a dark warehouse and offers him a terrible bargain: $50,000 for his agreement to be murdered a week hence. With a wife and two kids, loser Raphael (Depp) is looking for a way out when a trip to town leads him to Larry (Marshall Bell), apparently a businessman. Similarly vague, tale’s setting is Morgantown, location unknown, a desert outpost perched on the edge of a huge garbage dump. In this regard, Depp simply combines age-old Hollywood bad faith toward native peoples with the worst tendencies of two of his obvious mentors, Jim Jarmusch and Emir Kusturica, who often mask cultural condescension with arty pretension. There’s no specificity or authenticity to the characters they’re simply generic modern Indians, which understandably could be taken as exploitative or insulting.

Depp and Paul McCudden from Gregory McDonald’s novel, supposedly takes place among Native Americans must be counted as pic’s first problem. That the story, scripted by Depp, his brother D.P.

The brave 1997