Unlike “Death Sentence,” this month’s other revival of the 1970s vigilante movie cycle that simultaneously peaked and bottomed out with Michael Winner’s 1974 film “Death Wish,” Neil Jordan’s “The Brave One” is set in New York, home of Mr. Winner’s hero, Paul Kersey, and the real-life, headline-generating gunman of the 1980s, Bernhard Goetz. And since yesteryear’s fringe exploitation movie excesses tempt contemporary American filmmakers with potential mainstream box office success, “The Brave One” employs the same genre twist that Abel Ferrara offered in his New York-set “Death Wish” hangover from 1981, “Ms. 45”: The lone gunman is a woman.

A “witness to all the beauty and loneliness that is disappearing from our great city,” radio personality Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) walks the five boroughs documenting the sounds and voices of a metropolis whose edge has grown dull. But one night while she and her fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews of TV’s “Lost”), walk their dog, “the safest big city in the world” bares its old fangs. In a few quick and merciless strokes, a group of thugs leave Erica fiancé-less, dog-less, and clinging to life. After a three-week coma, Erica struggles with David’s absence and an acute case of post-traumatic stress. She fills her shaking hands with an illegal handgun, and when she inadvertently interrupts a crime of passion, by the third shot she has discovered that the first step toward recovering from paralyzing helplessness and fear is to kill. Like suicidal bees to toxic honey, sexist and sadistic leering grotesques pop up on the subways and streets that Erica roams, only to be mowed down by her trusty 9 mm.

NYPD detective Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), a cop charged with tracking down the anonymous vigilante killer, has his own axe to grind. He’s divorced, alone, and as frustrated by the legal system as Erica. In increasingly tender scenes in coffee shops, police stations, and hospital rooms, the cop and the vigilante try to sort out who knows what about whom while soothing the other’s profoundly damaged psyche.

Like Clint Eastwood, age has polished and focused Ms. Foster’s razor sharp features and added an arresting rasp to her husky voice. But her earnest, thin-lipped scowl and distinctive bandy-legged gait evince an intelligence and gravitas far beyond the scope of the limited emotional palette in “The Brave One.” Ms. Foster’s ferocious commitment to the role of Erica makes the film worth seeing even as her performance shines an unflattering, lie-detecting spotlight on every lazy, ill conceived contrivance that the film’s slipshod script and Mr. Jordan’s distracting visual excesses gracelessly heap on the actress’s shoulders. Though noisy, ugly, and violent, the film’s devastating park attack, for instance, pits Ms. Foster’s persuasively vulnerable character against a group of such cable-ready familiar and shallowly drawn street scum, that the scene seems less like a random collision of predators and prey than a surprise inspection by delegates from a visiting movie genre. She’s real and they’re not.

That reality gap only widens as the movie shamelessly trots out such overcooked character clichés as a soulful African émigré neighbor who pleads with Erica to “find a way to live,” and a bitter cop’s even more bitter district attorney ex-wife, while substituting the kind of GPS and cell-phone technology revelations that pass for plot in less intimate action fare. Mr. Jordan’s guiding creative principal appears to have been to shoehorn in as many ’90s action movie tropes — foot chases scored with jungle drums, crazy canted angles, and pounding heartbeat sound effects heralding hails of gunfire — as two hours can hold.

Local casting hires like East Village horror auteur Larry Fessenden as an extremely unsatisfied husband and shopper, “Summer of Sam” screenwriter Victor Collichio as a tourist from hell, and New York cop show mainstay Lenny Venito, add richer shadings to the film’s frustrating and insulting black-and-white morality, gallingly familiar situations, and cheesy dialogue. Mr. Howard gives as nuanced a performance as his role permits, and his reticent, oddly lilting mumble helps to place Mercer and Erica on the same sympathetic footing even when the former physically towers over the latter.

Clearly, “The Brave One” was made to capitalize on Ms. Foster’s gifts, and as narratively inept and emotionally fraudulent as the film quickly becomes, she somehow validates every silly, somber moment. Even before the initial tragic domino tip that leads Erica into the vigilante business, her character is suffering from a Stockholm Syndrome-like pathological identification with the cold and unyielding city holding her soul captive.