Well it would be the return of the protagonist of the Death Wish movies, except, as I noted back in July, instead of being played by Charles Bronson, he's being played by Jodie Foster:

Now The Brave One's plot (confected by Roderick and Bruce Taylor and Cynthia Mort) cranks up the coincidences; and the viewer starts playing a game that's dangerous for any adult thriller: What Are the Odds? Told she must wait a month to buy a gun, Erica just happens to meet a guy who'll sell her a hot 9mm. pistol for $1,000 in cash, which she just happens to be carrying. (What are the odds?) Browsing in a convenience store, she Just Happens to witness an armed robbery; she kills the perp with the gun she JUST HAPPENS to be carrying. (What Are the Odds?) Next she's riding the subway, where she J.H. to see two black dudes harassing the riders. They approach her, and she blows them away. (W.A.T.O.?)

I've lived in New York for 42 years, and as I watch the movie I'm thinking that this New York is both foreign — Baghdad without the car bombs — and familiar. Then it dawns on me: Erica, and the movie, have got caught in a time machine. Before the murder she lived in New York, 2007; after, she's in New York 1974, when the city was near bankruptcy, subways were blighted by graffiti, the murder rate had more than doubled in eight years and the mood of the people was grim and guarded. They might have cheered a citizen-vigilante.

In 1974, Hollywood gave them one: the architect played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. After his wife is murdered and his daughter raped, he is given a gun and, when attacked, kills the assailant, then stalks the city looking for muggers to punish. Reflecting and exploiting urban anxieties, the movie was panned by critics who found it reprehensible — "Poisonous incitement to do-it-yourself law enforcement," Variety proclaimed — and wildly garish. "This doesn't look like 1974," Roger Ebert wrote of Death Wish at the time, "but like one of those bloody future cities in science-fiction novels about anarchy in the twenty-first century."

Now we're in that century; New York's murder rate has fallen back to 1966 levels; and we have a movie that wants to attach the old dread to a very livable town. [Which became that way all by itself?-Ed] The Brave One makes urban paranoia a form of nostalgia.

Oddly, besides Foster, there are a surprising number of sclerotic bohemian Manhattanites, who having passed at some point in the last few decades from avant-garde to merely garde, actually are nostalgic for the bad old days. But then, there is no escape from the 1970s, in all of its kultursmog-inducing manifestations.

And speaking of nostalgia, note Time's headline, which dubs Jodie Foster the "Feminist Avenger". Isn't that merely another theme about 30 years past its shelf-life? But then, like all structural components of the American left, Hollywood's spending lots of time looking in the rearview mirror these days.

Update: Amidst her weekend roundup of movie reviews, Debbie Schlussel liked Foster's movie, with reservations.