Braven is basically On Deady Ground/Above the Law/Under Siege/Out for Justice or any Steven Seagal masterpiece of the early 1990s meets one of the best movies of all time (Young Guns) meets one meets the best Christmas movie of all time (Home Alone). And I don’t know if that sentence is a ringing endorsement or enough to get you to stop reading right now. In all honesty, it’s both. Lin Oeding’s feature-length debut, Braven, is far from a perfect movie. It is very, very flawed. But it is also highly entertaining. If Die Hard is your thing, then the Jason Momoa-led (Aquaman, Justice League) Braven will also be your thing. I can’t say you’ll love or remember much from it 24 hours later, but you will enjoy it, especially if you turn your mind off. Also, if he wants it, Momoa can be the new Segal, though he’s already proven he has more acting range than the former ever showed.
The plot is easy enough. Somewhere in a northern state in America, Joe (Momoa) and his father Linden (Stephen Lang – Don’t Breathe, Avatar), who is battling the early stages of dementia, take a day trip to the family’s cabin to lock, prepare, and secure it for the winter. It’s already snowing pretty severely. Ice covers the roads. There are fireplaces burning wood everywhere. If there’s not enough here to tell you it’s wintertime, well, it’s wintertime. Joe is a logger. It’s an honest job that allows him to drink beer at night and be close to his father, but more importantly, his wife Stephanie (Jill Wagner – Junebug, Splinter) and 11-year-old daughter (or thereabout) Charlotte (Sasha Rossof).
The four have an extremely loving relationship with one another. It’s after the latest brush-up with the law (Linden’s dementia getting in the way again and having him think a random woman is his late wife and it’s time for them to both leave) that Joe had to come in and save the day by beating up a bunch of locals that law enforcement tells him that if Linden stirs the waters again that it will not be good for him or Joe. The trip to winterize the cabin is for Joe to explain some of the options to his father about future medical care, which, unfortunately, includes moving him into a home. But, truthfully, it’s just a way to get the two men together in the middle of nowhere.
But of course, I mentioned that Braven is much like a Steven Seagal film. One of Joe’s logger friends, Weston (Brendan Fletcher – The Revenant, Distorted), has a side job of hauling drugs upstate on his runs. After a mishap with a local bad guy, Hallett (Zahn McClarnon – Resolution, Bone Tomahawk) lands the logging truck turned on its side on fire; the men know they have to get the drugs out of the vicinity before the local police arrive. Conveniently, as with so much in this movie, Joe’s cabin is just half a mile away. They walk to the uninhabited cabin and stash the money, having no idea that Joe and his dad will be there the next day. Weston and Hallett are met up by a handful of others, including Kassen (Garret Dillahunt – 12 Years a Slave, Winter’s Bone), the local badass leader of the group.
The next day, the half a dozen bad guys arrive at Joe’s cabin. No negotiations are even discussed, despite Joe, who would willingly give up the drugs to save himself and his father. What ensues is a game of cat and mouse. Will Joe and his dad be able to elude those trying to kill them to either get to safety or kill those trying to kill them? We know the answer here. Braven falls true to form, with one or two surprises here or there. Joe doesn’t have a rap sheet and, aside from slicing logs with an ax, doesn’t seem to have the necessary skills to kill a man. Maybe he has a background, but we don’t learn about it if he does. How some of the bad guys go down is unique, but of course, it’s just Oeding trying to do something unique. Why use guns when you have all of these cool gadgets to use as weapons? It has the Home Alone vibe going, and that’s not a bad thing. You have to take it as is. Home Alone was a comedy designed for kids and families. Braven is not a comedy and is not intended for kids or families. What worked successfully in Home Alone makes you cringe and sometimes roll your eyes in Braven. But turn your mind off and allow it to happen and I promise you’ll enjoy the film.
As far as Kassen, he is our main villain. We all know the culminating showdown in a movie like this will be between our protagonist and the main antagonist. Well, the hand-to-hand combat doesn’t work here. Dillahunt wasn’t great as Kassen, but he didn’t work as a physical threat. Momoa must have had six inches and 30 pounds of muscle on his much older counterpart. How much older? Try 40 years of age to about 55. The fact that there was even a physical confrontation was somewhat laughable. And this wasn’t the most ridiculous part of the movie. That was with Stephanie and Charlotte leading the local authorities through the mountains around the cabin without knowing if all the vigilantes had been removed. At any point, one could have popped out of a treeline and wiped out the whole search party. It was all somewhat goofy.
Braven wasn’t up for any Oscars. But it did score well with both critics and audiences. And it scored well with me. I’ve seen LOTS of films recently that haven’t held my interest. Braven wasn’t one of them. It was exciting and engaging and made good use of its time. It also further established that Momoa has a bona fide leading man. Aquaman was going to get its watches regardless of who its star was. A film like Braven was not. And if Braven flat-out sucked, it wasn’t going to get any love at all from either group referenced at the start of this paragraph. Momoa carried a pretty cheesy movie and made it, though predictable, also compelling. He’ll continue to lead in movies like this, but I hope he learns from Segal and doesn’t become a one-trick pony. That would be a shame to an actor with much more range and screen presence.
Plot 7.5/10
Character Development 7/10
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing 7.5/10
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 7.5/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 7/10
75.5%
C
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