‘Brave One' a jarring take on vengeance. Jodie Foster kicks tail, takes names in newest thriller.

Being Jodie Foster means never having to fight for the blanket in the morning. To her long line of widowed/divorced/romantically deprived heroines, add Erica Kane, the fear-addled radio personality who cuts a swath of bloody vengeance across New York City in Neil Jordan's rousing vigilante thriller “The Brave One.”

Certainly, it's the kind of lone-wolf role to which Foster (“Silence of the Lambs,” “Flightplan”) has become accustomed, albeit with a few eccentric surfaces to keep it from sliding into strictly predictable, regendered “Death Wish” territory.

Wearing her tomboyish shag like an emblem of urban female self-actualization, Foster plays Erica, an AM-radio storyteller whose Armistead Maupin-style ruminations about the disappearing “beauty and ugliness” of New York have earned her a small but loyal cult following. Waxing poetic about Sid Vicious at the Chelsea Hotel and other legends of the bygone Big Apple, Erica fancies herself a mythologist, the lone guard against Rudy Giuliani-style gentrification.

Perversely, Erica gets a bigger dose of New York ugliness than she can handle when a pleasant nighttime stroll with her physician fiancé (Naveen Andrews from “Lost”) is interrupted by a gang of vicious, camcorder-wielding street punks. True to form, Jordan (“The Crying Game”) delivers the violence unflinchingly - all the better to tear apart Erica's illusions of security and set the table for the feast of get-back to come.

Emerging from a three-week coma, Erica awakens to a new, less enchanted life. Her fiancé is dead, and she is unable to walk the street without wigging out. Marching into a gun store and impatiently demanding a firearm, Erica is like a drug addict looking to self-medicate. “I won't live 30 days!” she wails when told of the mandatory waiting period.

Naturally, Erica does get her gun, and - just as naturally - finds herself discharging it into bad people she meets on the subway, at the liquor store, etc. Pretty standard, avenging-angel stuff, but Erica is no steely, Charles Bronson-style street warrior. She's just a messed-up woman with an unusual coping mechanism, which allows her to embark on a halfway-normal friendship with a concerned homicide detective named Mercer (Terrence Howard from “Hustle and Flow”) who would never dream that the vigilante he's tracking is a mere woman.

“Women kill their children, boyfriends, husbands Â… things they love,” cracks Mercer's wiseacre partner (Nicky Katt).

Such humorous side trips tend feel a little out of place in the weighty dramatic flow of Jordan's direction, but Foster's full-boil performance is more than a match for such desultory trifles. Moreover, “The Brave One” is the rare, post-P.C. revenge drama that fully embraces its vigilante essence, and it makes for a jarring - if entirely welcome - show of affection.

‘The Brave One'

Stars: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Jane Adams

Behind the scenes: Directed by Neil Jordan, from a script by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort

Rated: R for strong violence, language and some sexuality

Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes

Grade: B