Colombiana

I've seen movies just like Colombiana many times, and I'm assuming you have too. It's yet another action thriller about a seemingly-soulless assassin, who just wants to lead a normal life, but most of all, wants to find the killer of their parents. In this case, the assassin is played by Zoe Saldana from Avatar. She doesn't get to show a wide range of emotions in her performance, but something tells me that was the last thing on the mind of director Olivier Megaton (great name, if it's real, which I doubt). I think the filmmakers were more interested in how Saldana fills out a slinky, black stealth suit. I'm pleased to report, very well.

Colombiana opens with a little girl from Bogota named Cataleya (played by 9-year-old Amandla Stenberg) watching her parents get killed at the hands of some drug dealers. Dad was in the drug dealing business himself, wanted out, and his former boss didn't take it well, as expected. Little Cataleya escapes from her parents' killers, and makes her way out to Chicago, where her uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis) lives. It turns out that Emilio is in the killer for hire business, and Cataleya wants in on the job, so she can track down the murderers of her parents. Fortunately, Emilio wants the child to get an education first, as you have to be smart and go to school to learn how to kill people, and not get caught. In one of the film's more insane early moments, Uncle Emilio demonstrates this by shooting up a random car in front of an elementary school in broad daylight, and simply walks away without anyone noticing.

We flash forward to the present, with Saldana now playing the role of the adult Cataleya, and using her skills her uncle taught her in a convoluted and loopy sequence where she manages to kill a prisoner who's being held in a jail overnight. Her trademark with her killings is to leave the image of a flower that shares her name drawn in lipstick on the bodies of her victims, as that was her father's mark, and she is hoping the drug dealer who killed her parents will one day see it, and reveal his location to her. Outside of her hired killing jobs, she's trying to have a romantic relationship with a nice young man (Michael Vartan), which is hard, since she can't really tell him anything about herself for his own safety. There's also a grizzled old FBI agent (Lennie James), who is trying to track Cataleya down, and for reasons the movie fails to go into, refuses to believe that a woman could be responsible for these hit jobs, and that it has to be a man behind them.

The whole movie works like clockwork, with all the expected character types, plot points, and action sequences that we would expect in a movie like this. This could still be fun if Colombiana was particularly well made or intense, but it's not. There's a certain laziness to every facet of the production. The action seems edited (and it most likely was, in order to get a PG-13), and the movie cuts away from the more sexual or erotic moments, which make you wonder why they bothered to include them in the first place. The movie was co-written and produced by Luc Besson, who specializes in mindless action thrillers such as this. Here, he seems preoccupied, as if his heart wasn't really in this one. His movies are usually a lot more explosive than this.

As if the movie wasn't easy enough to predict already, it has a nasty and not-very-subtle way of foreshadowing certain events. When we see a random scene of Cataleya feeding some vicious dogs that belong to a friend, we just know that those dogs will be chowing down on a bad guy later on in the movie. They do not disappoint, though I must say I am impressed that those dogs were able to hear her command to attack while the bad guy is talking to her on the phone. At the very least, the movie does venture into guilty pleasure territory at certain times, and comes close to working on some level. But then, the plot and the film itself go back on autopilot, and we're left waiting for the next insane moment Besson threw into his script in order to grab our attention.

Colombiana is the kind of movie we usually get at the end of August. Cheap, forgettable, and making a quick pit stop in theaters before it languishes on shelves at the rental store. I'm sure the movie was fun to make, especially for Saldana, who gets to show off a lot of fighting and acrobatic skills here. Too bad the film itself isn't more fun for the audience.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

0 comments